Invictus
by Maddeningly Mad
Summary: Post-Avengers. Before Loki can fulfill the punishment Odin sentenced him to, he is stolen by Thanos and punished for his failure. After two years, he escapes and lands on the doorstep of the Avengers. Together, they must defeat Thanos and his armies, save the earth, and help Loki become whole again. No Loki romance. Bamf!Loki, lots of Loki whump. WARNING: non-graphic rape, torture.
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer**: I own no recognizable characters. Loki, Thor, Odin, Thanos, the Other and the Chitauri, the Avengers, the members of S.H.I.E.L.D., and so on, are all property of Marvel. I am simply using them as playthings for the meantime.

**Author's Note**: There will be NO ROMANTIC PAIRINGS in this story other than the canonical Tony/Pepper and Clint/Natasha. There _will _be a very close - though platonic - relationship between Loki and Thor. Also, do not expect Loki to be a sniveling mess of broken flesh and splintered mind; he is an exceedingly powerful god, the most powerful sorcerer in all the Nine Realms, and he will be written as such. There will be a huge amount of Loki whump in spite of that, of course.

This piece is un-Beta'd, so any mistakes are mine own. Feel free to criticize anything and everything I have written.

Also, I have the first 41 pages of this written, so hopefully I will not subject you to lengthy waits between updates. I hope you enjoy! (And yes, each chapter is as long or longer than this one.)

**Warning**: This chapter involves mentions of rape, torture, and other acts of violence.

* * *

INVICTUS

**Prologue**

Up above, the people of Ásgarðr cheer, beat their fists on their steel-plated chests, shatter the stillness of the earth with the pounding of their feet. They are celebrating; celebrating Thor's great victory against the Chitauri, his great strength and bravery that saved Miðgarðr from the nefarious plans of his brother. Celebrating the rightful heir to the throne: Odin's firstborn – and only true – son.

Below, Loki seethes. He sits in a dark cell with his hands bound, still gagged, and glares at nothing. Everything has progressed according to plan; he is safe in Ásgarðr where the Other cannot reach him, and yet … _and yet _… he was unprepared for the fury that settled itself in his stomach like sickness when he arrived, and now it stews in him, maddens him. This place, the memories of living in shadows and taunts of _argr _and the cruelty of the Æsir … it is enough to twist his stomach. Worse, he has no magic; the manacles that have replaced the simplistic human handcuffs placed upon him by SHIELD agents quell his magic to a mere murmur of power, constantly slipping out of his reach whenever he tries to draw it in close to him. He feels weak, hollow and pathetic and weary. So this must be what it's like to be a mortal.

Loki's hands clench tight. A mortal. A damned mortal, a _human_ – the thought sickens him. He feels the bile rise in his throat and he forces it down, not particularly interested in finding out what will happen if he vomits while his mouth is bound shut with metal. Disgusting. Him! Loki Liesmith, the god of mischief, with his powers just out of reach, cast aside like something worthless to rot in the dungeons while above they celebrate – he will not allow for such humiliation.

Or, he would not allow for such humiliation if only he could actually _do _something about it. But he is bound and gagged and his magic is restrained, and his punishment still awaits him.

He remembers the Other's words, the warning: _you think you know pain? He will make you long for something sweet as pain_.

Fear stirs in his chest, sets his heart along at a galloping pace. _No_, he tells himself. His punishment will be at the hands of his _dear brother _and his so-called father, just as he planned, not the Chitauri or the Other, whose oily words still hang over him – they would not dare send him into the hands of their enemy. They would _not_. The people of Ásgarðr will protect their prisoner with all their might, and their might is indeed a glory to behold; Odin and Thor will want his punishment fulfilled at their hands. _Their _hands. Theirs. Everything will go just as he planned it to, just as it has so far.

Despite his reassurances the fear clenches tighter at his heart and turns his skin to gooseflesh. He has nothing to worry about, he tells himself. But he recalls the promise in the Other's voice, the fury that had contorted his false father's face when he had been brought before Odin.

Loki draws in a shaky breath through the metal clasped over his mouth and squeezes his eyes shut. Shameful moisture collects in his eyelashes and threatens to spill over his cheeks, but he collects himself, steels himself, braces his shoulders. He will not show fear.

He will _not_.

* * *

Nearly two weeks pass before he is graced with the presence of Odin-king. He is given neither food nor water, and although he requires both to a lesser degree than mortals do, he is beginning to fall victim to the hunger clawing at his stomach and the burn of thirst in the back of his throat. When Odin's shadow falls over him, he doesn't bother wasting the energy needed to raise his head.

Silence stretches for a long moment between the two of them: Odin standing tall, feet shoulder-width apart, Gungnir clasped in his hands, Loki seated with his head bowed, bound hands resting in his lap. Muffled chuckles spill out from his lips, which turn to rasping, hiccupping laughter as, with a wave of Odin's hand, the gag melts away.

"I expect," Loki begins as soon as his mouth is free, voice faint and rasping and so very weak, "that you are waiting for me to beg for mercy."

"I have no need to hear anything you have to say." Odin's voice is cold. "You are not deserving of my mercy. Thor has told me everything, and what he did not know, Heimdall has informed me of."

Loki presses his back against the wall and uses it to push himself up until he is standing. He ignores the black that swoops into his vision, the roaring in his ears. Doesn't bother to correct Odin, to tell him that even Heimdall, with all his gifts, knows _nothing_. "And what now?" he asks. "You leave me to rot? You exile me to Miðgarðr to teach me a _lesson_?" He sucks out the last of the moisture in his mouth and spits at Odin's feet, unable to curb the urge. "You are a fool, a pathetic example of a king – "

"Enough." Odin's knuckles turn white with the force of his fists. "You have proven yourself easily swayed by darkness. You are cruel, and selfish, and arrogant – more so than you ever claimed your brother was." Odin tilts his chin back. "It has been decided that you are too dangerous to be exiled from Ásgarðr. You will serve out your sentence in the Isle of Silence, where you will be jailed in isolation for one century. Your magic will be stripped from you permanently. When you have served your sentence, another council will meet to determine how to reintegrate you into society."

Loki's legs shake – not out of fear so much as out of pure exhaustion – but he grins, trying hard not to pant with the effort of remaining on his feet. "Imprisonment?" Loki asks, voice hardly more than a whisper. "You are too soft, Allfather." Imprisonment, yes, _good_, exactly what he wished for, hidden away where _He _can't find him – but the permanent erasure of his magic? No. That must be rectified, that _cannot _happen – but there is that anger, rolling in his stomach as nausea would, and it dulls his vision, his tongue, makes him stupid.

Odin's eye narrows. "Still your tongue," he booms, and slams the hilt of Gungnir against the ground. The shockwave that ripples out from it is enough to topple Loki with a grunt, knees buckling and slamming against the floor with enough force to make his eyes water. On his knees, bowed, thirst and hunger burning at him like fire, Loki pants, breath coming in sharp, short bursts. He reaches for his magic subconsciously, but its familiar comfort draws away from him, slips out of his grasp, taunting him from just beyond his reach.

"Tell me, _Father_." Loki's voice falters, but he manages to continue in a croak. "Why is it that Thor, who brought you to the brink of war with – " (_with Jötunheimr, with that bitter chill of winter and monsters, abominations, disgusting freaks where he belongs where he should have died where he should have been left, free of Odin's 'mercy'_) " – with his arrogance, fulfilled his punishment in a meager three days, while I, who simply meant to assert my power over a people _below _me and in no way brought danger to Ásgarðr, must serve years of isolation to reconcile with my supposed sin?" Loki's eyes narrow; his teeth are bared in some freak semblance of a grin. "One might think you play favorites, _Father_."

But Odin is looking down the hall, distracted, and fury boils over so suddenly in Loki he cannot control himself. "_Listen to me_!" he screams, voice raw and breaking. "_All my life_, I have been in his shadow – all my life, I have wished for nothing more than for some _recognition _from you that I am more than a waste of the breath that passes through my lungs – "

Odin holds up a hand and the metal gag reforms itself around Loki's mouth. It makes no true difference, for Loki's throat is chafed and far too dry to make any semblance of sound after his outbreak.

Breathing hard, shaking with rage, Loki watches Odin, who is suddenly motionless and alert. "There is something here that should not be," Odin murmurs, and not a moment later the shadows explode into motion.

Ten Chitauri appear out of nothingness, voices screeching and thunderous as they swarm the Allfather. Taken by surprise, Odin is slammed to the ground, Gungnir spinning from his hand to land a good fifteen feet away. The Chitauri leap atop him, keeping him still beneath their combined weight, and around his neck they tighten a blue-shimmering noose which makes him cry out and then lie still, unconscious. They turn to look, expectant, at the shadows from whence they sprang.

A heavy boot thuds against the ground, followed by another step, and the shadow parts to reveal a massive body larger than even Thor's. The eyes that glint down at Loki are cold and practically brimming with fury. He recognizes that face, that which has haunted all his visions and dreams since falling from the void onto that hellish rock. Fear consumes Loki, sets his heart racing, constricts his throat with icy hands.

He is trembling. He remembers falling, falling so far, in the dark and the cold, and so much _pain_, as if his body were tearing itself apart and rearranging itself wrong and not knowing why or how, and he remembers looking up into that face once and knowing fear and agony and lust for power that would devour him.

Loki swallows hard. Thanos's eyes narrow and a cruel smirk plays on the edge of his mouth. "The Chitauri did tell you," he says. "No matter where you hid, no matter how far you ran, I would find you if you failed."

Thanos leans in close, his face nearly pressed against the bars of Loki's cell. "And, if I am certain of anything," Thanos continues, "it is that you most definitely failed."

Thanos straightens back up, his gargantuan body filling the expanse of Loki's vision, and spares a glance at the Allfather, splayed out on the ground. "Leave him," Thanos says, and he looks back in Loki's direction. "We take only the prince."

Loki panics, well and truly panics. He scrambles to his feet, reaches desperately for his magic, would be screaming in frustration if he weren't gagged when it slips away from him. Thanos finds this amusing; he laughs, a roar that jars Loki and makes him stumble again, and he is scared, truly, honestly _scared_, because he remembers – he _remembers _– what was done to him when Thanos first found him, when his magic had been exhausted and the hulking beast had destroyed him, bringing him to the brink of death before offering him a chance at survival.

And now, when he has failed, when Thanos is looming in his vision and the bars are evaporating into smoke, and the expression on Thanos's face only promises to make him wish for something as sweet as pain, Loki knows with sudden, intense conviction that he will be begging for death before the week is over.

* * *

But, apparently, Loki is wrong. He does not start begging for death within the week; he is not given the chance to. When Thanos's magic brings them to the dank, barren rock with which Loki is so very, very familiar, his first act is to tear out the sorcerer's tongue. It regrows that night, when Loki is curled, shivering, panting, skin flayed and ripped with whips that burn with poison, in a cell made of pure energy which saps him of all his strength and magic.

Thanos tears it out again the next morning.

And so it begins.

The first seven days he spends spread out, naked, on a metal table, wrists and ankles shackled so tightly he cannot move even an inch. His legs and arms are hyper extended, joints threatening to pop out of their sockets. When Thanos gets tired of his wordless snarling after the first few hours, he shoves a strange metal contraption into Loki's mouth that expands when he twists it, biting into his healing tongue and the roof of his mouth and his gums, and Loki gurgles and struggles not to choke on his own blood. He cannot utter any more than a thin wheezing sound.

In the course of the week, Thanos systematically removes Loki's fingernails, so goddamn slowly, prying at them with white-hot tongs. Loki loses consciousness more than once; the first time he comes to again, he notices with unbearable humiliation that he has lost control of his bladder. Thanos does not bother cleaning him up. Eventually, Thanos grows bored of this, and instead he cranks a pulley which yanks at Loki's limbs until he is screaming around the metal in his mouth, until his shoulders pull loose from their sockets.

When Loki is unlocked from the table, shoulders snapped back into position, and then dragged back to a pitch-black, soundless room, he lies on the floor for three days, unable to move. The silence makes him want to scream, pound his fists, do _anything _to add noise to the vacuum – but the only sound he can make is a low, gasping gurgle in the back of his throat, tongue flopping uselessly whenever he tries to form words.

On the fourth day, a creature with skin so white it glows in the darkness administers a drug through a syringe, and almost immediately Loki feels as if he is floating, pain all of a sudden absent, an almost overwhelming euphoria replacing his numbness. Some part of him panics, knows this is a _trick_, it has to be a _trick_, but his relief beats his panic down.

The effect wears off in a few hours, and afterwards he is in more pain than he thought imaginable. When, the next day, the creature returns with a syringe, Loki snarls and tries to fight it off, but it calls in four Chitauri to hold him down, and Loki is powerless. He begins to crave the drug, to _need _it, and Thanos knows it.

One day, Loki is dragged out of the dark and brought into a bright-lit room where a few dozen Chitauri await him. Loki has regained use enough of his limbs at this point to put up a better fight, but in the end it's futile; Loki has always been fated to fail.

Loki is ripped apart, limbs broken and splintered, Chitauri eager to avenge their fallen brothers tearing at him as a pack of dogs would their prey. His inherent magic which cannot be suppressed always heals him, mostly, before the night is up, and he is a blank canvas once again for Thanos's hate. He is burned, force-fed and then beaten until he has vomited up everything and begins to puke blood, his skin peeled off his bones as he screams: wretched, horrible sounds that he does not recognize as coming from his own mouth.

Time passes. Loki's healing slows, and Thanos, not quite ready to give up his little toy, calls off the more physically destroying torture. Loki's relief is short-lived. He is poisoned – an awful, horrible drug that burns at his skin and makes him vomit blood, whose effects always fade within the day. For fun, Thanos sometimes sews his lips shut before administering the drug, and Loki gets far too familiar with the sensation of choking on his own bile and having to swallow it down. Other times, Thanos simply stops giving Loki the drug he craves, and in his withdrawal he seizes and gags on air and tries to vomit but he _can't_, there's nothing in his stomach to come up. He sees things that can't possibly be true – Odin and Thor and the others, calling him an abomination, a monster, _Loki Laufeyson from Jötunheimr _who committed patricide and attempted genocide and suicide and he is worthless pathetic despicable, and he begs for the drug, _pleads _for it.

_I'll do anything_, he pleads, hysterical, _anything, I swear it, please. _And Thanos, with a cruel grin on his face, turns him over to the Chitauri and they clamber on top of him, jeering at him in a tongue he understands, telling him _beg for us_. And he begs, oh, he begs. His mouth and legs are forced open, and they are inside him, he is being torn open, and he is sobbing and pleading for it and begging them to stop at the same time, because _it hurts_ and there are so _many _and it just – it _won't stop_.

His body is defiled, used, and in the aftermath he is covered with the _filth _of those creatures and he shakes so badly he can hardly move. But relief comes in the form of the white-skinned creature and the syringe which contains his ambrosia, and he could practically sob in joy.

Occasionally, there are periods of rest. Days in which no one will come, when Loki's battered body – so thin by now he hardly recognizes it – has a chance to heal itself properly, when paranoia sets in so severely he almost wishes they will show him the cruelty he has come to expect. During these occasions, food fit for royalty will appear, and water, cool, pure water that eases the relentless burn in his throat and reminds him that once he was alive. That once he was a prince, that once he led these _creatures _into battle for the sake of a throne. The first time, he throws himself onto the offering with reckless abandon, starving, hardly caring if it is a trick. He spends the next week screaming, tortured by hallucinations (for they _must _be hallucinations – they _have _to be) of Odin and the others having their way with him, hatred painted on their faces, cruel satisfaction gleaming in their eyes when he is reduced to a sobbing heap.

Some days, Thanos does not touch him at all, but comes to stand before him outside his cage, and needles at him. Tells him that _he _is the true monster, he who has fallen so very far from grace, that he is disgusting, an abomination, that he is unworthy of mercy or love or affection. That he was used for Odin's purpose, that he, Loki Liesmith, Loki the tempter, Loki the god of mischief, was manipulated and used and abused by those he once thought loved him. For how could anyonelove such a _pathetic_ creature? All of Ásgarðr saw him as a jester whose suffering was cause for laughter, whose victories were met with indifference. Even Thor has left him in the hands of Thanos; Thor, who claimed to love him, who called him brother.

Somehow, those days hurt worst of all, and when Thanos finally, finally leaves him, Loki wants to do nothing more than fall into darkness and never again see the light of life.

All throughout, Thanos demands of him information; information about Miðgarðr, of the strange beings who defend it, the 'superheroes' whose team the great and mighty Thor has joined. But something stays Loki's tongue, keeps his mouth tightly knitted shut while he shelters the truth deep within him. He will not help Thanos, he _refuses _to – and he is punished for it.

He is often revisited by the Chitauri and other creatures, some twisted Jötunn or demons who stand twice his height and use him as they please, who fuck him until he can do nothing but howl in agony, twisted words lost to incoherent sobs and broken pleads to leave him be, until his voice fades to a whisper, then to silence, and still they use him and abuse him until they have had their fill and he reeks of sex and disgust.

What feels like an eternity passes. Loki learns to bury himself where no one can reach him, where the pain is but a distant ember where once it was an inferno. His hopelessness, his terror, solidify, turn red-hot with rage, and he _seethes_: boils over with rage and lust for revenge and the overwhelming, all-encompassing desire to rip Thanos to shreds and watch, screaming in laughter, while Thanos grovels before him.

Loki learns to keep terror painted on his face when in actuality he is listening to the whisper of his captors' thoughts, plotting his escape, spreading himself out, searching for the wisps of energy bound to the universe that he could possibly use while his own magic is kept from him. For a long time, his efforts are futile.

But one day, while his body is in violent throes of agony induced by the electricity coursing through his veins, Loki's mind – _cool detached calm cool detached calm _– comes across the faintest of hints of magic, something far away and condensed and _powerful_.

He can hardly believe his luck. He recognizes the power source for what it is immediately: a seed of the great Ash Yggdrasill which connects the Nine Realms. Yggdrasill has released its seed, that which would be reabsorbed into the great ash tree's roots to keep the tree alive and flourishing – and Loki intends to use it. Loki reaches out, strains for it, manages a tentative grasp on the trail of Yggdrasill's seed, and _pulls_.

It takes him nearly three days of intense effort to draw the seed close to himself, and in those three days he is so separated from his body he hardly feels the stitches sewn cruelly into his lips or the weight of the Chitauri who take him as if he belongs to them.

When he holds the seed fully within himself, when he feels its warmth and its power wash over him, he begins to laugh through his stitched mouth, blood painting his lips – the half-crazed laughter only those who have lived through death make – and he cries, properly cries, of joy. Thanos, watching him, thinks his mind has finally broken.

Loki is patient. He nourishes the power, focuses on winding it into the very fabric of his being, works it over and over until it is nearly as malleable in his hands as his own magic would be if only he had access to it. He does not use it, does not wish to bring Thanos's attention any closer than it need be. Instead, he allows his body to react to the pain, allows his wounds to heal at their disgustingly sluggish pace. He focuses all his energy on cultivating the magic he stole from Yggdrasill's seed, and it grows from a few warm embers to a great fire that only he can feel, so closely entwined with his essence it now is his and his alone.

He knows he has to act soon. Despite the magic he now holds tight within his grasp, his body is failing him. His frame, always lean, is skin and bone and atrophied muscle. He has been so long in pain that he hardly recognizes it as such; indeed, when now they grasp his arm and _snap_, so that bone pierces his flesh, he has to remind himself to scream. It hardly even hurts any more. His body is numb, but his mind is frenzied with the thirst for revenge.

Loki's thoughts turn to the Avengers, and he knows – despite their warring interests in earlier meetings – that he will require their aid. Oh, Thanos will be his – but he knows that Thanos plans on invading Miðgarðr, knows that he will strike with an army many times the size of the army Loki himself led against the Avengers. Loki could – if he were in the best of health – defeat the army if he so wished, but he knows that as soon as he escapes this rock Thanos will set his plan into frenetic motion and that he will thus have little time to heal. He will have to convince those oafs to help him – but Loki does not balk too severely at this. He has ever been a flexible one, ever had a tongue which spins sweet lies as easily as a spider spins its web: Loki, the weaver of deception.

The day is coming that Loki will raze this place to the ground and slip between the cracks of the universe to come to Miðgarðr– but for now he sits and waits and breathes and plots, trembling with excitement where once he shivered in pain and fear.

Oh yes, his day is coming – and he will break Thanos as surely and completely as Thanos broke him.


	2. Chapter One

**Author's Note: **Just so everyone knows, the POV of this story _does _switch around quite a bit depending on who it is I think will be the best narrator, hence why this chapter is written from Tony's POV. What can I say?

As I stated previously, feel free to critique anything and everything that I've written. I live for constructive criticism. As I'm still not exactly _happy _with this chapter, I'd love some feedback.

* * *

INVICTUS

**Chapter One**

It really has been a _wonderful _day. Tony and the rest of the Avengers are on vacation at Tony's Malibu mansion, taking a break from saving the world and making Noble Prize-worth scientific discoveries and doing whatever super-assassins do when they're not off killing people for a living. They have spent a rather lazy day bumming out on his stretch of private beach, laughing, scuffling, and generally acting more like a group of teenagers than the world's most powerful team of superheroes.

Tony himself has knocked back something like four or five strawberry daiquiris over the course of the day as well as a few fingers of scotch, and he's feeling quite pleasantly buzzed. Earlier, he'd gone a few rounds with Thor before realizing that sand was getting in all the crevasses of his Iron Man suit. Afterwards he'd spent about two hours in the water, appreciating the red bikini that Natasha was rocking. (Pepper is off at some week-long conference thing in D.C., and what she doesn't know can't possibly come back to bite him on the ass – right?)

Of course, he had realized that he wasn't the only one taking advantage of the sight; Clint seemed unable to tear his eyes from Natasha. The only difference was, however, that Natasha actually didn't seem to mind that Clint was watching, whereas she had wasted no time in slamming Tony into the sand and saying between clenched teeth that if she _ever _saw him looking at her like that again, so help him she would tear off his favorite appendage and force-feed it to him. Despite Tony's pretense of nonchalance, he really was quite terrified – how would he explain _that _to Pepper?

After that, Tony had kept his distance from Tasha and instead joined Steve, Thor, and Bruce in a game of beach volleyball. He'd had to explain to Thor what beach volleyball was, exactly, and then he had to explain it again to Steve – who, despite living now for over three years in modern times, still didn't have a very good idea of what normal people did for fun besides destroying punching bags. Steve and Thor were ridiculously good at the game, of course, and they were winning by a solid twenty points before Bruce finally shifted into the Hulk and flattened them – and the ball - completely. Tony had felt outrageously proud: a year ago, Bruce never would have allowed himself to give control over to 'the other guy'. Tony had slapped Hulk on the back in congratulations and found himself sailing through the air a split second later.

And now, the sun is sinking below the surface and Tony is stretched out on a towel, and he can't help but think it has been a _damn _good day. However, when you're a member of the Avengers and you've sort of got the safety of the entire world resting on your shoulders, those 'damn good days' are generally too good to be true: a fact that proves itself when, not a moment later, an obnoxious alarm starts blaring from the mansion, loud enough to be heard even from the beach.

Ten minutes later finds the Avengers mostly toweled off and sand-free, still in their bathing suits, assembled in the main room where Nick Fury's face is currently projected on a large holographic screen. He looks deadly serious – more serious than Tony's seen him since Phil Coulson walked into the conference room three months after Loki's attack on Manhattan and the Avengers had spent hours screaming at Fury at the injustice of what he'd done.

"You know that we're on vacation, right?" Tony asks, but Natasha levels a glare at him and he pouts, then quiets.

Steve says, "Director Fury, sir. What's the news?"

"We're picking up readings not far from where you are," Fury says. "About fifteen miles out over the water. The readings seem to be similar to those that precede inter-dimensional travel. The last time we had readings like this, Loki was paying a visit to Manhattan with a posse of his best buddies."

Beside Tony, Thor stiffens and uncrosses his arms, hands balling into fists. "Are you implying that my brother could be behind these 'readings'? He has for the last two years been imprisoned by my father in the Isle of Silence."

"Hell if I know. Only thing I know is that _something _is visiting us from somewhere else, and in all probability it won't be friendly. Suit up and check it out – I'm sending you the coordinates now. I'd rather not waste SHIELD agents if you can take care of it. It keeps casualties to a minimum."

"You know, it's just so _heartwarming _to know that you care so much about us and the continuation of our lives. But, hey, who cares if we die? We're only the best you got, no biggee." Tony's sarcasm is met with a deadpanned glare from Fury's one good eye, somewhere up on the level of _I will gouge your eyes out with a dull spoon _but somewhat less frightening than his _I will pull out your intestines and force feed them to you, then laugh as you dribble on the floor._

Fury's voice is sharp, commanding. "That's exactly _why _we're sending you. _Because _you're the best we've got, and because I haven't a clue what to expect from this. And Thor – "

Thor lifts his chin. "If it _is _my brother, I will take him back to Ásgarðr where he can serve the rest of his punishment. I doubt that he could be behind this, but all the same, I make this promise to you."

Fury nods, a sharp jut of his chin, and then his image disappears.

Tony heaves a sigh. "Alright," he says. "I guess the party's over."

Steve ignores him. "You heard the man," he says. "Suit up."

* * *

As it turns out, the trouble makes it to them before they make it to the trouble. It's Clint who notices it first as he buckles himself into the pilot seat of the quinjet, which is stationed on the roof of a recent addendum to the house. He squints out the windshield, frowns, and asks, "anybody else see that?"

"See what?" Tony asks, turning to look in the general direction of Clint's outstretched arm, and not a moment later a streak of black and green and gold fills the sky and slams into the side of Tony's house. The impact jolts them; Clint and Natasha, already seated, are slammed sideways, while Tony is sent stumbling into the nearest wall of the jet, creating a laughably realistic imprint of his suit against the metal. Thor's knees buckle, Steve gets thrown to the floor, and poor Bruce is jerked off his feet and slammed into a wall before he lands on his back, groaning.

After the impact, it is surprisingly quiet. There is only the sound of the house settling and the faint crackling of energy in the air. Tony has several comments he wishes he could make, none of them particularly cheery, but he's finding it hard to get his breath back.

Steve wastes no time in taking charge. "Clint," he says, bounding to his feet, "stay on the roof. Tell me if you see so much as a speck in the sky, you hear me? I want more of a warning if this happens again. Thor, stay with Clint; if you see something in the sky, strike it down. Tony, Bruce, you're with me – we're going to confront whoever it is that decided to ruin our day."

"Preach it, girl," Tony says, but Steve is turning to Natasha now.

"Natasha, I need you to be prepared to apprehend mystery man if he tries to run. Keep hidden, but close by. You hear me?"

"Yes, sir," Natasha says, voice dry. She tips her head in a mock bow and then she's slipping out of the jet with a dancer's grace, lithe and sinewy and prowling, and then a moment more and she's gone.

Steve nods sharply. "Move out," he says, and the remaining Avengers spring into action.

* * *

Whatever it was that fell, it crash-landed in the middle of Tony's living room, went through his Steinway, and managed to completely destroy the two rooms beyond it before going out the other side of the house.

Upon seeing the state of his house, Tony doesn't even bother stifling an incensed whine. "That piano was an antique! What kind of bastard misses the TV but manages to smash my _antique, extremely expensive piano _to smithereens?"

"You don't _play _the piano, Tony," Steve tries to say, but Tony isn't listening.

"And _my floors_! I just had them waxed – I could actually _see _my reflection in them. Son of a _bitch_."

"Tony," Steve says, no longer Steve but instead Captain Rogers, and Tony makes a sort of odd noise a child not getting its way might. "We'll worry about your precious floors later."

Bruce, all big and green and rage-monster-y, snorts in laughter and seems to purposely tread on the remnants of the piano as they make their way to the gaping exit hole. Under his breath, Tony mutters, "thanks, asshole."

The Big Guy in question flicks his fingers against Tony's side and sends him flying, once again, into a wall. Groaning, Tony clambers drunkenly to his feet, swaying. "Jesus _Christ_, Big Guy," he complains, "that was _cold_. No, seriously, I can feel the temperature dropping as we speak."

"Stop fooling around," Steve snaps, glowering first at Tony and then – with just a hint of trepidation – at Bruce. "Something just _crashed through your house_, Tony, and for all we know it could be hell-bent on world domination. Get your priorities in order."

"Yes, mommy dearest," Tony says, and smirks beneath his metal mask when Steve rolls his eyes and sighs. The three of them come to stand by the exit hole, and are met with the sight of a deep furrow clawed into the ground – quite obviously the path whatever it was that fell took.

"Goddamn," Tony says, eyeing the length and depth of the furrow. "How fast was this guy _going_?"

The three of them waste no time in following the furrow alongside it, noticing with some unease the blood that streaks the bottom of the furrow in fits and starts. Even Steve – super soldier Steve, more used to the horrors of the battlefield than either Bruce or Tony – seems faintly ill. Bruce watches the path with an expression of morbid fascination that is, if Tony is being honest, slightly disturbing, especially on the Big Guy's face.

And then they make their way to the end of the deep furrows, and all three of them take a startled step backwards, Bruce half-growling, half-grunting as he does so. The thing that is half-buried in dirt is humanoid, but just barely; its arms and legs are too thin, its too-pale yellowish skin stretched too tightly over prominent ribs, its frame too still for it to be alive. It's half-naked, wearing only a pair of loose gray cotton pants that are ripped and frayed, completely destroyed beneath the knees. Blood and dirt cover every inch of uncovered skin, and beneath it wounds – some half-healed but raw and blackish-red, some open and festering – bleed sluggishly. Whatever it is, it was once a man – but now … ?

Steve brings a slightly trembling hand to his headset and clicks the communicator on. "We've found it," Steve says, and if his voice is perhaps a little mechanic, a little devoid of life, it's not like Tony can blame him. "I don't think it's a threat, not in this condition – but … whatever did this to him …"

"The sky is clear," Clint says. "Do you want us over there?"

Steve hesitates, then replies in the affirmative. Tony isn't really paying attention, is much more focused on keeping the contents of his stomachs firmly in his stomach.

Bruce leaps down into the furrow, already shifting back into his less green, less rage-monster-y form, holding his pants up with one hand. Steve and Tony join him after a moment, standing just behind him. "He's alive," Bruce says after just a moment of examination, pointing out the faint rise and fall of the man's chest, "but he shouldn't be. I mean – look at some of these wounds. They go down to the bone – and the way they're infected … "

Bruce reaches out a hand to point at one of the wounds in question, a jagged, weeping cut that stretches from the man's collarbone all the way down to his hip. A moment later, when Bruce's finger lightly brushes against the person's skin, the man's hand snaps up and encloses around Bruce's wrist with a bruising grip, broken fingernails digging into his skin. Steve and Tony flinch backwards, but Bruce is held in place by the man's iron grasp. Tony's entire body tenses, and without realizing it he sinks down into a half-crouch, prepared to fight.

Steve's hand lands on Tony's shoulder, heavy, and when Tony turns to look at him he is shaking his head almost imperceptibly. It takes more effort than Tony is willing to admit to relax.

"Hey, it's okay," Bruce says, adopting a soothing tone. "You'll be alright – we're going to get you help right away. You'll be fine."

The man's head rises slowly, joints popping, his long black hair – matted and tangled, and as encrusted with blood and dirt as the rest of him is – shifting to uncover his face as he does so. His eyes are red-rimmed and pale, pale green or possibly blue, bloodshot and deeply sunk into his face. The skin beneath his eyes is bruised and purplish-red, and his face is so gaunt, so skeletal, that Tony is struck with the impression that death itself is looking up at him. There's something oddly familiar about it, something in the eyes or perhaps in the slope of the cheeks that sparks recognition and a nagging, twisting feeling in the pit of his stomach.

The man tries to speak, but the only sound that spills from his mouth is a muffled sort of gasp. The attempt draws Tony's attention to the man's lips – thin and pale beneath the blood, stitched shut with a thick cord.

Bile rises in Tony's throat, but he forces it down. Steve, in the corner of his eye, is pursing his lips, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallows several times in a row. Tony is too shell-shocked to react when the man lets go of Bruce's wrist and, bringing his hand to his lips instead, attempts to pry the stitches out.

"Whoa, whoa, hey, there," Bruce says, and he closes in again on the man. "Hold up a sec, okay? We don't want you to hurt yourself – "

There is a sound like a whimper or a muffled sob or both, and then a spark of golden light and the tight knots of the cord come undone. Bruce flinches backwards – _oh _Christ_ that is disgusting, that is _disgusting_, _thinks Tony, and he feels oddly faint – and then the man manages to pull the cord all the way out of his mouth, lips twisting obscenely as he does so.

The man doesn't scream, but his throat convulses and a thin, wheezing gasp passes his lips. Shaking badly now, he drops the cord on the earth and stares up at Bruce, a twisted, grotesque smile that could be a grimace on his ruined lips.

"The Beast," the man gasps out, words slurred and stumbling. His pale, pale eyes skip over Tony and Steve, focus, defocus, focus again. "And your … fellow soldiers, I see. S'very … pleasant. To see you again, despite the … the circumstances of my … my arrival."

"I – I'm sorry," Bruce says, glancing back at Tony and Steve quickly. Tony stares back at him, just as confused, and shrugs his shoulders; _I don't know what the fuck's going on, don't look at me!_ "I don't remember – have we met?"

The man's eyes close again. "I would have thought I left … more lasting impress - impression," he says, and there is a wry sort of mockery in his voice despite his halting, sluggish speech. "I am insulted."

"I don't understand – " Bruce begins, and not a moment later the remaining members of the Avengers quite literally drop down among them, Clint in Thor's arms, Tasha sliding out of the shadows, catlike. Thor steps closer to Bruce, one hand on his hammer.

"What is this?" Thor demands, but a moment later his eyes are locked with the man's and his entire body stiffens so abruptly that Tony cannot help but react the same way, panels on his arm shifting open to reveal dozens of explosive-tipped rounds.

"Brother?" Thor asks, voice soft.

The man's eyes narrow, and then suddenly his chin jerks up so he is staring into the sky, every line of his body rigid with tension, eyes wide and white and glistening. "They're coming," he says, so abruptly it is almost a snarl, and he is on his feet but a second later, stumbling and clutching at his abdomen with a sound almost like a whimper. He remains on his feet, but just barely, legs already beginning to tremble with the exertion of standing.

"Wait, hold on. 'Brother'? As in, Loki, the psychopath who tried to take over the world? _That _brother?" Tony's voice is rising in disbelief, shock and revulsion growing in him until it is overwhelming. This – this _skeleton _before them is Loki? Loki, as in, 'Loki the crazy Norse god with serious daddy issues and a mean right hook and a glowy magical stick of destiny'? No. No, it can't possibly be.

But the-man-who-can't-possibly-be-Loki glares, and oh, _god_, does Tony really recognize him now. Tony stares; he can't help it. He takes in the oozing wounds on his chest, the dark bruises and contusions, the scars, the filth that seems to be beaten into Loki's skin, and, yeah, he's the bad guy, he tried to _take over the world_, but – but this – who could have done_ this_?

Loki suddenly doubles over, a growl ripping its way out of his throat before fading to a choked whimper. He convulses, frail shoulders shaking, and slowly sinks to his knees. He's breathing hard, arms encircling his stomach, and Thor is at his side in a moment, reaching out to help him, and Loki practically _roars_. His eyes blaze with gold light for a moment before Thor is sent skidding back twenty or thirty feet. The effort it must have taken Loki to react in such a way causes his face to clench in pain, a strangled moan passing his lips.

"Do not - touch me," Loki pants. "Do not – do not do that." Tony risks taking his eyes off Loki for a moment and looks back at Thor. Thor is clambering back to his feet, an expression of shock and horror so vivid on his face that it would be comical in any other situation.

Natasha speaks up suddenly, bringing Tony's attention back to the situation at hand. "You said 'they're coming'." In the quick glimpse Tony gets of her face, even she seems affected – lips pursed, a sheen of sweat over her forehead, skin somehow ashen in her horror. Despite this, her voice is steady – of course it is. Leave it to the brainwashed super-assassin spy, eh?

Loki seems unable to speak, breath coming out of him in short, heavy bursts. He nods, lips pressed tight together.

"And 'they' are … ?"

It takes Loki a few seconds to respond as he staggers once again to his feet with all the grace of a newborn child. He opens his mouth to respond, and then his eyes catch on something in the distance and for a split second terror is so naked on his face that Tony's heart clenches – and then terror fades to fury, and Loki bares his bloodstained teeth. "_There_," he says, almost hisses, voice clearer and sharper than it has been since he crash-landed, and it's not an answer but it _is_.

Tony wastes only a moment of uncertainty before he turns, eyes drawn to a dark smudge growing on the horizon. A few feet away, Clint curses under his breath. Tony frowns and sharpens and magnifies the image, swallowing hard when he realizes that the dark smudge is a horde of fifty or sixty _things _that can only be described as demons scorching across the sky towards them.

"Well, damn," Tony says. "I wasn't expecting a party today. If I'd known we'd have visitors, I'd've gussied up a bit." The creatures are approaching quickly, almost impossibly fast. "So, uh, what's the plan, Cap? They don't exactly look like they'd be good houseguests."

Loki lurches forward, settling himself firmly at the front of the pack. Tony gets an eyeful of Loki's back, taking in with sickening horror the scores of whip-wounds and savage burns across his skin. Golden energy is beginning to swirl around Loki's bare ankles. "No," he rasps. "They would not be."

"Isn't _that _reassuring," Tony says. "Right, then. Sorry, buddy, looks like you'll have to sit this one out – not that we blame you, or anything, you just kind of look like you're about to keel over dead, and you'd probably just get in the way."

Loki turns on Tony, fury burning in his eyes. "Do _not_ tell me what to do," he hisses. "I will cut out my own heart before I follow the orders of some _mortal_, especially a mortal such as you, who thinks himself a _hero_."

Whatever response Tony is planning is lost when Steve shouts, "_incoming!_" Just a second later, the creatures are slamming into the earth around them with thunderous crashes, dust and sand and rock filling the air.

When the dust settles, the Avengers are completely surrounded by the demon-like _things_, each creature over twelve feet tall and heavily muscled. They growl and bare lengthy fangs, flex fingers set with sharp claws, but none advance, simply shifting in their ranks. Tony turns, slowly, and feels the tell-tale throb of adrenaline beginning to pump in his heart. In the corner of his eye, he can see that Loki is trembling with exhaustion or pain or fear or rage, or perhaps all of the above, but his teeth are bared in a bloody snarl and he is dropping into a defensive position, readying himself to fight.

Tony's attention is brought to Steve when the Captain steps forward. "Who are you and why are you here?" Steve asks, voice loud so that each creature can hear him.

The creatures exchange glances, and then a behemoth comes shouldering forward. It's at least sixteen feet tall with pale gray skin and massive shoulders and armor that seems to be made of bone, so white it hurts Tony's eyes to look at. It leers down at the Avengers with disturbingly colorless eyes. When it speaks, it does so in low, gravelly tones. "Thanos sent us to retrieve 'is pet," he says, baring its teeth in an odd semblance of a grin. "Two years, and 'e still don't know 'is place, do 'e? 'e run away all scared-like, and Thanos wan' 'im back."

"Thanos? His pet? _Loki_?" Steve's unspoken question rings in Tony's ears: _you did this to him?_

The beast chuckles. "That 'is name, ain't it? Little princeling who lost 'isself in the dark. All pretty-like – had fun wit' 'im, we did. We showed 'im a good time. Likes it rough, 'e does – 'fraid we mighta damaged 'im a bit, 'e's so small … but don't make no difference, do it? "

Fun? _Oh, God_. For the second time today, bile rises in Tony's throat as he catches exactly what that thing is saying. Someone makes a choked, snarling sound – _Loki._ From the looks on the other Avengers faces, they, too, understand perfectly what this _thing _is getting at. Almost as one, they are shifting their stances, readying themselves to spring – all except Thor, who bellows his rage and in a sudden, ferocious movement heaves Mjölnir through the air, crunching into the beast's skull and sending it flying backwards.

Mjölnir returns to Thor's hand a moment later, and he has just enough time to roar out, "_who's next?_" before the creatures leap into motion. Tony loses sight of the rest of the Avengers in just a few seconds, vision consisting only of the stampeding creatures, and decides to take to the sky. With a roar of his thrusters, he is sixty, seventy feet above the others, readying his weapons and thinking how best to proceed without accidentally maiming one of his teammates. Luckily enough, Thor is quickly scattering the creatures with great swings of Mjölnir, spreading the creatures out (but causing no apparent damage, a fact which makes Tony swallow in fear) and allowing Tony to take note of where his teammates are and how to avoid them.

Tony looses four blasts quickly and succeeds only in making one of the beasts extraordinarily angry. It bellows and leaps at him, its jump sending it well over Tony's elevation, claws outstretched, but Tony skirts out of the way and sends several explosive-tipped rounds in its direction. Its bellow changes to a scream and it falls, landing with a sickening crunch atop one of its friends – but both are getting to their feet and roaring, dazed and injured but still willing to fight.

_Shit_.

Both beasts jump toward him, massive muscles flexing, and Tony thinks, fast. "Jarvis?" he says. "Full power to the uni-beam."

"Sir, I must protest. The uni-beam will require nearly forty percent of the suit's power in order to breach the enemies' skin, and doing so while in midair could be highly dangerous."

"Forty per – _fuck_. Okay, well, just _do it_, Jarvis, because they're getting closer, here – "

A sigh. Then: "yes, sir. All power to the uni-beam."

The beasts are within an arm's reach of him when he deploys the uni-beam, and their startled shrieks are the last noise they make before they're blown out of the air and crash, in steaming chunks, among their buddies. Tony, yelping, freefalls until he is but ten feet from the ground before the thrusters kick back in and he swoops up, up, out of the reach of the nearest creature.

"That was, perhaps, not your best move, sir," Jarvis says, sounding resigned. "If I may suggest, the suit may require a few advancements in case you are planning on having future conflicts with these creatures."

"You don't say," Tony says.

Tony cracks his knuckles and swoops down, intent on drawing some of the things away from the others so that Clint and Natasha – struggling under the combined assault of five or six of the things – can step back, gain their composure, and then kick some serious ass. Tony has more than enough confidence in Clint and Natasha's combined skills, but there is worry brewing in the pit of his stomach, because, _shit_, these fuckers are strong.

His plan doesn't quite go as he expects it to, namely because before he can reach the ground an unseen force grabs hold of him and sends him spinning in another direction, slamming him against the ground. Groaning, Tony struggles to his feet and manages to duck out of the way just before a fist thunders through the air. Eyes narrowing, Tony aims several blasts at the beast's armpit and is rewarded with a keening screech. Tony readies himself and grabs hold of its throat with both hands, then rockets one, two, three hundred feet up, farther, farther, until the sounds of battle are almost nonexistent below them. Gritting his teeth, Tony turns and doubles the power of his thrusters, and they are approaching the earth at the fastest speed Tony can push the suit to – ("come _on_, Jarvis, all the power to the thrusters, _there _we go") – and then in a thunderous boom the beast is clobbered against ground.

A little woozy but mostly unharmed, Tony clambers out of the crater he just created – he does not quite trust himself to fly just yet – and is met with the sight of the remaining Avengers disappearing beneath a mob of the creatures: difficult to take on one-on-one, impossible to deal with when it's fifty against just a few.

Tony grits his teeth and prepares himself to leap into the fray – but then golden energy loops around his middle and drags him backwards, pins him to the ground.

"What the _hell_?" he says, struggling and finding he is unable to move so much as inch. "What the – _you_!" He sees Loki just a few feet away, blood splattering against the ground whenever he takes a lurching step. "What the fuck is your problem? I am _trying _to fight, here!"

"You will never beat them like that," Loki says, and then with a scowl twisting at his mangled lips he _pulls_, hard, golden strings erupting from his fingertips and disappearing into the fray – and just moments later the Avengers are being reeled towards them through the air, bound in the same ropes that bind Tony. They land with various grunts around Tony, and, like him, their golden bonds keep them in place, unbreakable; even Bruce can only manage to growl, his impressive strength worth nothing against his bonds.

"What are you _doing_, brother?" Thor roars. "Let us go!"

"In case you hadn't noticed, we're fighting your battles _for _you," Natasha says. "We're _on your side_, Loki, _let us go_, or I swear to you I will pull your guts from your belly and strangle you with them."

Loki glares at her and staggers a few steps forward. "I'm saving all your lives," he snaps. "Don't be ungrateful." He disappears in a wisp of golden energy and reappears somewhere in the thick of the battle, judging by the way the creatures that had started toward the Avengers bellow and turn back. Tony utters a few choice curses under his breath, struggling against his bonds – but he can't break them, none of them can, and they watch with gritted teeth and pained expressions as the creatures howl, pushing in tighter and tighter around Loki, a heaving wall of enormous bodies whose cacophonous yowling fills the air.

"He will die!" Thor says, and his panic is evident in the whites of his eyes and the desperation in his voice, and he's _scared_, oh, Christ, _Thor is scared_. "Brother! _Brother!_"

"Loki, don't decideto be a deranged martyr _now_, we're actually trying to _help_!" Tony adds, loudly as he can. Bruce bellows wordlessly. The sound is ridiculously, impossibly loud, the creatures' voices throbbing so painfully in Tony's ears he can't hear himself _think_, and what is Loki's _problem_, what the _fuck _is going on –

The noise cuts out to absolute, pure silence, the air surrounding the creatures bubbling strangely – and then the area explodes into light with a deafening roar. The energy is blinding, so gold it hurts to look at, and Tony turns his head, grits his teeth, waits for the shockwaves to reach him. But as the energy washes over him, he feels a slight tingling in his toes and nothing more.

The gold fades to wisps of energy, fades to nothingness, and with a hint of surprise Tony finds that he can move again. He clambers to his feet, and is hit by vertigo so intensely he has to sit down, groaning and holding his head in his hands.

"What the _hell_ was that?" Clint asks, voice somewhat weaker than usual.

"Seems like a bomb went off," Steve says. Tony climbs to his feet again, this time more slowly. With a sort of sickening lurch in his stomach, he notes that the rock around him and his teammates is scorched black and crumbling. And everyone else – _please let no one be hurt_, Tony thinks, perhaps a little frantically.

He takes inventory of his teammates, and notes with some satisfaction that despite looking a little off-kilter they all seem like they escaped any life-threatening injuries. Clint has a gash across his cheek and he's keeping his weight off his right leg, but his eyes are sharp and clear. Tasha has a few rips in the arm of her cat suit, beyond which Tony can see blood dotting the surface of her skin, and a split lip. Bruce, reverted back to his littler, more peaceful self, moves tentatively, as if he might be a bit bruised, but seems alright beyond that. Steve's got a few scrapes across his face, and Thor – wait.

"Where'd Thor go?" Tony asks, noting with an uneasy frown that Mjölnir was left half-buried in the rubble. Steve, too, notices this, and immediately is striding towards the site of the explosion, worry in his eyes.

"Thor?" Steve calls out. "Thor, where are you?"

The reply is a few beats late, loud but somehow flat, as if Thor has lost all his energy. "Over here. With Loki."

Steve and Tony exchange a glance. Natasha is already jogging in Thor's direction, Clint limping along and notching an arrow as he does so. Banner is close behind, holding his pants up as he runs. Tony and Steve follow them after just a moment of hesitation. As they make their way over to Thor, Tony can't help but notice that there are no bodies, no chunks of flesh, not so much as a hint of blood. What there are, instead, are streaks of dark gray against the ground, scorch-marks, almost as if – as if …

_Oh_.

"Holy shit," Tony says. "Oh, my god. Do you see that? Tell me you see that. No, actually, you know what, don't. I don't want to hear it. Tell me, please, that Loki _doesn't _have the power to set off an atomic bomb. No. No, no, _no_. _Jesus_."

"Stark," Steve says, voice low. "Be quiet."

Tony turns toward him, opening his mouth to tell Steve off – _you're not my mother, boy scout _– but he swallows his words when he sees Loki. Thor is bent over his brother, on his knees, holding Loki half on his lap; Loki's head lolls against Thor, entire body slumped and rag doll-like, boneless. Beneath Thor and Loki is a steadily-widening pool of dark liquid that looks suspiciously like blood, and it sure as hell isn't coming from Thor.

Before Tony can say a word, Bruce drops to his knees beside Loki and, in soothing tones, convinces Thor to lay him back on the ground. Thor's eyes are impossibly dark, and his breath comes in ragged pants. When Bruce gestures for something to staunch the flow of blood, Thor rips off his cape and hands it wordlessly to Bruce, who ties it tightly around Loki's chest and then instructs Thor to keep pressure there, yes, that's right, directly over a series of puncture wounds.

Bruce spends a few minutes looking over Loki, occasionally running his fingers along his frame or pressing gently against his arms or skin. He measures his heartbeat, two fingers beneath Loki's sharp jaw, and frowns deeply, settling back on his heels.

"What's the diagnosis, doc?" Tony asks, forgoing stepping closer because, quite honestly, he isn't sure if his stomach can take it.

Bruce looks up and all over his face is that expression that says that things couldn't possibly get any worse. "He could die if we don't get him the attention he needs," he says in a sort of forced calm. "I don't even know where to begin describing what's wrong with the guy. I … he's _broken_."

Steve nods and presses a finger against his headset, activating it. "Director Fury, this is the Captain speaking," he says. "We've got a situation. We need – I don't know what we need. Bruce, what do we need?"

"I can't fix him," Bruce says, shaking his head. "We need the Helicarrier, _now_. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s got the best medical care available aboard that ship." Steve nods again in affirmation and turns back to the communicator.

"Alright, sir, we need to get to the Helicarrier, stat. We haven't got much time – there's someone here who desperately needs medical attention."

Fury's reply is loud enough for Tony to hear: "Is it one of ours?"

"No, we're all fine. It's just – you're not going to like who it is, but he helped us, and he's in bad shape. So _hurry_."

"Now, wait just a minute – " Fury says, and that seems to be about all that Bruce can handle, because he rips the communicator from Steve's headset and yells into it:

"_Just get here already, okay? _You're wasting time!"

Fury is quiet for a moment, and when his voice crackles back to life he says, "alright. We're heading in your direction now. We've sent a jet down to get you; it'll be there in half an hour. That's the best we can do."

Bruce nods, eyes closing briefly, and the green tint to his cheeks slowly fades. "Thank you," he says, and then he clicks the communicator off.

* * *

The jet arrives three minutes early, and the Avengers wait until Loki is strapped into a gurney and secured in the belly of the jet before they enter. Thor squeezes in past all of them and huddles next to Loki, hand closing almost tentatively around his brother's. Against the golden complexion of Thor's fingers, Loki's skeletal hand seems impossibly pale, a sickly white-gray-yellow – as if his skin hasn't been kissed by sunlight in years.

Bruce straps himself in across from Thor, and Tony sits down next to him, not quite sure why he's decided to board the jet instead of flying back to the Helicarrier by himself. Clint's face is stony, shoulders stiff, as he sits down opposite Tony. Tony notices with a faint smirk that Natasha's hand is resting lightly on Clint's thigh, her thumb stroking gently against the fabric of his suit. When Natasha notices Tony looking, she glares daggers; but she keeps up the motion, calming Clint, and Tony almost laughs.

Steve moves past them, checking to make sure each has their respective seatbelt on. He goes up to the co-pilot and they begin a conversation in hushed tones that Tony doesn't bother listening in to. He's not particularly interested in taking a closer look at Loki, either, but it's hard not to when they're in such a cramped space and the villain's gurney is practically crammed up against Tony's knee, and the guy's sort of bleeding to death all over the place.

There's nowhere really to look, nothing to say, and so awkward silence descends upon the group, a question impregnating the otherwise stillness of the air: _what the hell are we doing with this guy?_

To be honest, Tony has no goddamn clue why they are bringing Loki back to the Helicarrier, why they're saving the guy's life when he sort of destroyed Manhattan last time he was in town. Tony refuses to believe that this is _sympathy_, he's _definitely _not feeling sympathy or pity or just plain bad for the guy; he deserves what was done to him, every ounce of it, is responsible for the deaths of over a thousand people, tried to _take over the whole fuckin' world _–

But it's hard to keep telling himself that when Loki whimpers a little in his comatose state, flinches and begins to shake, tries to curl into himself and is unable to because of the tethers keeping him strapped down. Tony presses his lips together, not quite able to bring himself to say anything, and is left feeling like something's been ripped out his chest when Thor squeezes Loki's hand and, after a moment, Loki calms and his long, white fingers wrap slowly around Thor's.

Well, _shit_.

Tony remembers what it's like to be tortured, to be afraid for your life because the control is all in somebody else's hands. Three months of imprisonment and fear, and he's still waking up from nightmares about it, all these years later; less so now than they used to, but still common enough. And this, what Loki's clearly gone through – it can't have just been three months. It must have been years.

Clenching his hands into fists, Tony breathes in deep through his nose. _God_, he thinks, _I am getting soft_. He thinks he must be the only one, but there's a curious worry in the Cap's eyes, and Bruce is running his thumb over his lower lip and staring at Loki's still frame, and Thor is still and quiet in his despair. Clint and Natasha are, as ever, stoic, but there is a hard tension to the set of Clint's shoulders, a steel in Natasha's eyes and a stiffness about her posture. Tony stares at Clint and tries to imagine, just for a moment, what it would be like to see the man who controlled you, who forced you to betray the people you worked for and trusted, lying on a gurney, unconscious, defenseless, weak, on the verge of death.

Clint and Natasha think this is a bad idea, helping Loki instead of leaving him to die. Even Tony can tell that. _He_ _tried to _kill_ Phil Coulson. He unleashed an army of monsters on Manhattan._ He's not just _a _bad guy, he's _the _bad guy, the Big Bad –

Beside him, Bruce clears his throat as if he's going to say something, but seems to think better of it. He's still bare-chested, tattered pants hanging off his frame – and, jeez, you'd think they'd have thought of a better costume for him at this point, something that could shrink and grow along with Bruce – and a few bruises are blossoming on his chest. Minor injuries; they'll heal soon enough.

Tony wonders what Bruce thinks of this whole thing. In their two years together as the Avengers, Tony's become closest with Bruce; he considers the man in many ways to be his best friend. The only man who really _understands _Tony's language, who has his beast wrestled under control while Tony is still trying to figure out how the hell he's supposed to be facing his demons and coming out on top. If Bruce thinks that this is a good idea, then Tony can be reassured that he's not crazy – that taking home a deranged god who's tried to kill them all in the past in the hopes that when he wakes up he'll be willing to work with them, or at least _not _try to rip out their guts _isn't_ completely round-the-bend cuckoo.

Tony jabs Bruce in the side with his elbow, harder than he intended. Bruce practically jumps out of his skin, turns to look at him, and asks, "what the hell was that for?"

"Just wondering," Tony begins without preamble, "on a scale of one to, say, Ozzy Osbourne, exactly how insane are we?"

Bruce gives him a little half-smile and turns back to Loki. "Oh, we're way off the scale on this one."

_Shit_, Tony thinks, _so I _am _crazy_.

But Bruce is continuing, voice soft. "But he needs our help. And whatever's after him clearly isn't friendly, and doesn't have any qualms with knocking us about. He's got a dangerous enemy, and I'm guessing that we should consider them enemies, too. So, yeah, this is pretty crazy." His smile turns a little more lopsided and he breathes in deep. "But, hey, when have we ever been known for making the sanest decisions?"

Tony chuckles. _He does have a point_, he thinks. He leans back, crosses his hands behind his head, and attempts to close his eyes, to relax, but finds himself unable to. His thoughts are circulating too quickly, his breaths coming too shallowly, his heart throbbing in his chest. He tries to ignore the mess that is Loki, but his eyes open, again and again, to narrow in on the god's visage, the sharp, fragile lines of his shoulders, the stark edge of ribs cresting out over taut, filthy skin.

When the time comes to unload Loki from the quinjet, Tony lets out a breath he wasn't aware he'd been holding. As soon as Loki disappears around the corner he feels the tension drain out of him, leaving him weak-legged and shaky. He needs a drink, he thinks, or two or five, needs to get utterly smashed, because his head is still spinning and he just wants his thoughts to shut the hell up. But before he can take a weary step to the interior of the Helicarrier, Fury is marching up to him and the gathered Avengers with a scowl on his face and a glare in his eyes that is currently _way _above the normal 'oops-Tony-did-bad' glare, and he _really _doesn't want to deal with this right now.

Fury comes to a complete stop, folds his hands behind his back, and says, voice calm and icy and ohdeargod _terrifying_, "what. _The hell_. Is going on here. Explain yourselves. Now."

_So much for our vacation_, Tony thinks, and sighs.


	3. Chapter Two

**Author's Note: **Not sure if Loki's withdrawal symptoms were clear enough but, yes, just making sure that everybody remembers that he was addicted to some weird strain of alien morphine. Critiques are more than welcome - I'd love any and all feedback, especially if it can help me become a better writer.

* * *

INVICTUS

**Chapter Two**

* * *

Loki wakes up to find himself choking, drowning, he can't find his tongue he's – he's – he can't breathe can't talk can't scream can't _move _why can't he move (and yet when he catches sight of them his arms his legs everything arching and twisting and scrabbling) he can't – he needs to –

There are voices, confusion, people barking orders, alarms going off, somebody hovering close to him and he tries to concentrate, but there's so _much_, so much noise so much pain so much heat rolling off their skin on his skin in between the very fibers of his being and he can't think _he can't breathe _he's panicking and he can't even see or hear or think or speak and he's scared he's scared he's _scared_.

Something around his wrists snap, lets go, and suddenly he can tear himself away from the hands and the wires and he's falling onto something cold and hard and he still can't breathe, his vision is swimming and blurring and he's choking, gagging, and there's an awful burning pain in his mouth and _they cut off his tongue _they cut off his tongue and his stomach heaves but there's nothing to vomit; but red splatters onto the floor, so much red, and some stringy yellowish goo – _bile_, his saner portion reminds him – and that's enough to set him off again, stomach wringing itself, throat constricting, the horrible upsurge and acidity that _burns burns burns _and again, red, all over the sterile whiteness of the room, and finally he slumps, something warm and sour dribbling over his lips and down his chin, so drained he can hardly will himself to move.

He's aware, distantly, that he must be sitting near or perhaps in a pool of his own blood and bile, that he must have pissed himself if the heat running down his inner thighs is anything to go by, but he can't lift his limbs, can't make his muscles respond, can hardly bring himself to twitch his fingers. The heat is overwhelming, is pressing down on every inch of him, is screaming within his skull, getting hotter.

Skin presses against his and he scrambles to his feet, slips backwards, loses his footing on the red-coated floor. The world is blurred, tilting crazily, but there's a flash of gold, a hint of something he should remember, something he _knows _he remembers but cannot reach, and he presses himself backwards – _hide, _he's telling himself over and over and over again – and somebody reaches towards him. With a growl, he claws at the hand, knows he draws blood when the person yelps; thinks, perhaps, he can get away, he can melt into darkness and escape. And then a pair of hands land on him and he is shrieking and twisting in their grip but the hands are strong and large and familiar and they hold him in his place, and then there is a prick, something sharp and narrow breaking his skin, and then his knees are buckling and the world is fading to white.

* * *

Thor tightens his hold on his brother when Loki's knees give out, taking care to keep his grip gentle. Loki is dead weight, the medicine that the mortals injected him with having taken effect almost instantaneously. As carefully as he can, Thor lifts Loki up so that he is cradled in his arms, Loki's long limbs dangling limply. He weighs nothing, or close to it, and his bones strain against the surface of his skin, dig into Thor's flesh. The medical men had cleaned up Loki to the best of their ability, but he is filthy again; red stains his knees and his urine-soaked dressing gown, and there is blood and bile around his mouth , dripping down onto his concave chest. In the commotion, Loki's managed to reopen several of his wounds, leaving entire patches of raw, infected skin oozing red.

The medical man who now sports several bloody furrows over his forearm gestures towards Thor, ignoring his own injury. "Bring him here," he says, and pats the bed. "We need to get him cleaned up again, take a look at his tongue."

Thor nods and places his brother on the bed, where immediately the medical man bends over Loki and opens his mouth to examine it. The man whistles, a low, uncomfortable sound, and says, "he almost bit clean through it. We'll need to stitch this – " and then he turns to the other healers and they begin to speak as if in tongues, names of chemicals and compounds that Thor has never heard of before.

Unsure of what to do but reluctant to leave, Thor seats himself carefully on the edge of Loki's bed and places his hand on his brother's brow. He is feverish, sweat beading his temple, and his entire body quivers. Thor remembers watching in horror, just ten minutes previously, his brother seizing on the bed, back arching, limbs flailing, spasms wreaking his body. The sight of these tremors sickens him.

A hand lands on Thor's shoulder and he looks up into the face of the medical man whose forearm was injured. A friendly smile lends a soft appearance to the man's sharp-featured face – wide jaw; broad, hooked nose; dark, dark eyes. His hair is startlingly white against the darkness of his skin, but his smile is brighter. Despite the situation, despite that his brother is broken and he hasn't a clue what to do, Thor feels himself relax. The man squeezes his shoulder, gently.

"You alright?"

"Physically, I am well," Thor says, and he has to swallow a lump in his throat and blink a few times before he can continue. "But otherwise – I am concerned for my brother. I know not the extent to which he has been harmed, but what I can see with my own two eyes is … it is horrifying. I admit, I am … I am scared that my brother may be irreparably damaged."

The man's smile shifts to a sort of grimace, and he looks back at Loki for a moment before meeting Thor's gaze again. "I know you're scared, son. Believe me, I know. But we're gonna do all we can, and we're some of the best of the best, so your brother's in good hands. For right now, though, I'm sorry but you gotta leave – we've got work to do. Your brother had a seizure, and it's imperative we get him the proper care he needs. It's probably best if you don't stick around."

Thor hesitates, but there's steel in the medical man's eyes, steel and a promise to keep Loki safe, and Thor finds himself nodding. He stands, and is surprised to find that, while he towers over the man, the man keeps his gaze. "You have my gratitude," he says after a moment. "You will – you will let me know how he fares?"

The man gives him a smile that crinkles at the corners of his eyes and exaggerates the deep laugh lines around his mouth. "'Course I will."

Thor turns to leave, then turns back. "What is it that they call you, medical man?"

"Denzel, Doctor Denzel Hudson – I'm the head honcho of the medical division." He's pulling on white gloves, picking up a bottle of liquid that he splashes across the furrows on his forearm as he grimaces. He jerks his head toward the door without looking up. "You should really go."

Thor nods one last time and manages to exit the room before revulsion rises so suddenly that his head swims, the image of his brother convulsing and vomiting blood burning his retinas. He has to sit down on the cold floor for several minutes before he can find it in himself to stand up again. Wishing only to keep his mind blank, he begins to wander, allowing his feet to take him where they will.

Within the passing of half an hour, Thor finds himself arriving at the door to the small gymnasium set aside specifically for himself and the other Avengers. From within, he can hear the throbbing pulse of the music Stark is so fond of; perhaps it is indicative of too much time spent with the man that he can recognize the song after hearing only a few seconds of it. Thor opens the door without thought and is met with the sight of the Man of Iron in nothing but a pair of shorts, exchanging blows with a sparring bot.

For close to a minute, Thor simply watches; but then, when Stark ducks away a little too slow and catches a glancing blow to his shoulder, cursing explosively, Thor calls out, "having trouble, my friend?"

Stark stumbles a little in his attack and is rewarded for his lapse in concentration with a quick blow to the head. Groaning and spitting curses out between clenched teeth, Stark manages to get out the words, "hey, hey, _hey_, _stop it already_," and jab at a remote nearby. The robot immediately stills, music shutting off mid-note.

"What the hell are you doing here?" are the next words out of Stark's mouth, blunt as always. "Weren't you busy playing Mother Hen with your brother in the infirmary?"

"I was told to leave," Thor says. "The medical man told me it would be best."

"The doctor," Stark says, and Thor looks at him, puzzled, until Stark heaves an exaggerated sigh and says, "it's _doctor_. Not medical man. Seriously, your girlfriend is a doctor and you can't remember that? Besides, I thought they were all done putting Humpty Dumpty back together."

"I do not understand."

"You know. Humpty Dumpty fell off a wall, broke into a million little pieces? Pretty fitting title for a certain God of Mischief, if I do say so myself." Stark picks up a towel hanging nearby and uses it to wipe off the sweat on his face.

Lightning crackles in Thor's veins. "I would advise you against being so cavalier in your words regarding my brother," he says. "Enemy though he may be, he is injured badly and requires our aid."

Stark holds up his hands in an _I surrender _pose and shrugs. "Hey, hey, I wasn't insulting him. Okay? Believe me. That'd be like … kicking a puppy, or something."

Thor sighs and crosses his arms, feeling uncomfortable and grimy in the clothes S.H.I.E.L.D. procured for him from some Miðgarðian marketplace. It has been two days since Loki's return, and this is the longest he has been away from Loki's side since then. Not for the first time, he is forced to think of the details of Loki's arrival. He had thought, had been told as recently as three weeks ago, that Loki was safe and relatively complacent in the dungeons of Ásgarðr, and then Loki had fallen out of the sky with a horde of strange Jötnar after him, emaciated and tortured nearly beyond recognition.

Thor refuses to believe that his father could be responsible for Loki's condition, but the idea that his father lied and told him Loki was imprisoned on Ásgarðr instead of telling him that Loki had escaped or been captured … the thought leaves a foul taste in his mouth.

"Take it easy, big guy, I don't think your brain is used to that level of activity," Stark says, and this Thor recognizes as an insult. He glowers. Stark chuckles, then walks over to him and claps him on the back – so brave, this mortal who stands more than half a Miðgarðian foot shorter than he.

"In all seriousness, though," Stark says, voice quieter now. "How is he? He looked pretty bad last I saw."

"His condition hasn't much improved," Thor admits, thankful now for the weight of Stark's hand on his shoulder. "Not an hour ago, he woke briefly after what Son of Hud called a 'seizure' – "

"A _what_?"

" – and he managed to reopen many of his wounds. I fear no mortal medicine will heal him, but I dare not bring him back to Ásgarðr before I understand what has happened." Thor shakes his head, slowly. "I am worried," he says, quiet.

Stark raises his eyebrows. "We can tell," he says. "Believe me. For a great warrior of Norse mythology, you sure wear your heart on my sleeve."

"My garb has no sleeves," Thor says. Stark closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and knuckles his forehead.

"You know what, never mind. Hey, let's gather everybody and set up a sparring tournament or something. It'll make you feel better. Plus, you get to beat the shit out of me. I solemnly swear I'll let you win a round."

"Why would I require your permission in order to defeat you in single combat?"

"Oh, please. Norse god versus top-of-the-line tech designed by yours truly? You don't stand a chance."

Thor narrows his eyes. "Get your suit on, Man of Iron, and gather the others," he rumbles. "I'd like them to bear witness to me making you – what is the phrase? – eat your words."

* * *

He is brimming with blood and agony and screams that shatter hope and snap vocal cords and he is on fire, every inch of him – _gods save me_ he is nothing but raw gaping emotion and pain and he can't think or breathe or speak. Something shrieks, sobs, something feral and broken, rising in pitch and volume until it is everything, all-encompassing, and it's him _Yggdrasill it's him _and he can't stop, _he can't stop. _Something lurches beneath him and he is tangled, tied, _they found him_, he is straining against his tethers and he is _scared scared scared _brother _please _help brother –

(_the second son the wretched son the forgotten son_)

– no _no _NO _don't touch me _don't – touch – me – please no _please _– hands all over him, spreading him, tearing his skin, shame spilling over his thighs and he is filthy, FILTHY, _please_, help, get away please, _I'm begging you _PLEASE.

Something cold against his skin and he pushes, hard, screaming incoherent, guttural words, flings outward with tendrils of power. And then he's falling, legs catching on their tangled bonds and he thrashes – _need to get out oh gods need to get out _– and he needs to run to hide get away get away get _away_. He is shivering, tremors rendering his muscles useless, but he manages to flop onto the floor and scramble backwards until his spine hits something cool and hard.

Breath coming in pants, Loki feels around his body, drags himself into a corner. Weaves his fingers together behind his head, face hidden between his raised knees, and he can't – stop – _shaking_, just – STOP, _don't touch me _–

(_FIGHT me _he had once roared with tears in his eyes)

– he never was never wanted to never meant to, and he's sorry, oh, gods, he's sorry. And he chokes on his next inhale and wraps his arms tightly around his knees, clings to himself. Heat gathers in his eyes, spills out over his cheeks, and he can't breathe, can only draw in ragged, heaving sobs, the kind that wrench themselves out of his throat and refuse to be subdued, that leave his entire body shuddering and shaking and weak.

* * *

The video streaming in from Loki's infirmary room in four different angles is nothing short of disturbing. The God of Mischief is huddled in the corner, knobby fingers tangled in his filthy hair and pulling, hard, bony knees drawn to his equally bony chest, and he is silent, completely silent except for his ragged breathing, entire body shaking with the aftermaths of his breakdown. The white medical gown he's wearing dwarfs him, makes him look like a child dressing up in his father's clothes. It's been five days since Loki quite literally fell into their laps, and this is the first time he's woken after his seizure, and god_damn _if Tony isn't getting really fucking tired of being on the Helicarrier.

Tony breathes in deep and pinches the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. _Jesus_. He is not alone – everyone save Thor, who's travelled back to Ásgarðr on the repaired Bifröst to talk to his old man, has gathered here in the main conference room – but the room is so silent he could be. The only sound is that which comes from the video: the hitching, trembling breaths that pass Loki's lips.

Bruce is the first to speak. "We should do something," he says. "We can't just leave him in there alone."

"Did you _see _what happened to the doctor who tried to subdue him?" Fury snorts. "Dr. Hudson told us to wait it out, so we wait."

Tony drags his palm over his face and mumbles a few choice curses under his breath. Some minutes later, a tinny sound startles his eyes open and he's met with the sight of the on-screen Loki slowly pushing himself to his feet, the gown crumpled up somewhere around the top of his bone-thin thighs.

_Son of a bitch_. Loki's inner thighs are so violently bruised, mottled dark purple and red and greenish-yellow, that Tony has to look away. He closes his eyes again and says, "Jesus – _fuck _– son of a … " in fractured English.

Natasha says, voice quiet, "so that thing wasn't lying, then."

There is a long, long pause, and then the rustle of clothes as someone gets up. Tony opens his eyes in time to see Fury stride out of the room, boots heavy against the floor.

On the screen, Loki leans heavily against a wall and uses its support to help drag himself toward the bed. His legs threaten to crumple more than once, but he manages to make his way to the bed before they give out and he falls, torso splayed across the mattress, legs hanging off – _Jesus _even the backs of his thighs are mottled blue-purple-yellow, all the way down to the hollow behind his knee. Tony lets out a long breath he wasn't aware he'd been holding when Loki finally pulls himself up onto the bed. He curls into himself, skeletal limbs folded together, atop the twisted blankets.

Perhaps fifteen minutes pass before an old man – Dr. Hudson, Stark presumes, based on his garb – walks into the room and begins taking Loki's vitals. Loki seems to be dead asleep, but when Dr. Hudson grasps his knees gently to slide him under the covers, he thrashes and cries out. Dr. Hudson lets go and steps back, and it takes several minutes before Loki is calm again. The doctor steps out of the frame to walk back into the hallway, and when he reappears he's holding several blankets, which he carefully arranges around Loki's still frame.

Tony lets out another breath and drums his fingers against the table when the doctor leaves the room again after setting up an IV, Loki a small lump beneath layers of blankets. This was entirely not what he had expected to happen when Loki made his reappearance; he'd been thinking more along the lines of a second attempt to subjugate mankind, this time with more trumpets and confetti, if he's being completely honest.

Across the room, Steve stands up. "I know that Loki's our enemy," he begins, and oh, god, he's going to make a speech. "And I know that we're all a little … shocked, and yes, Tony, I know that you're upset that your mansion is destroyed – "

Tony snorts. "I've done worse to it. My birthday party three years ago, oh, _man_, that took months to recover from – "

"Tony." Steve levels one of his trademark Do Not Interrupt Me stares in his direction. Tony rolls his eyes.

"Oh, right, sorry, I forgot. Big important speech. Don't worry, I'll zip my lips." So Tony zips his lips and throws away the key, and Steve surveys him for a second, as if trying to decide whether or not Tony will actually stay quiet. Tony raises his eyebrows and tries to adopt a wounded face. Steve sighs, shakes his head, and turns back to the rest of the team.

"Like I was saying. I think we need to start preparing for the worst."

Tony's eyebrows skyrocket. "Preparing for the _worst_?" he says, conveniently forgetting that not a minute ago his lips were zipped and locked. "Um, 'scuse me, have you noticed we've got a psychopathic demigod downstairs who quite literally looks as if he's been dragged through hell and back? How can things get much worse than that?"

"Those creatures said that they'd been sent to get Loki back," Natasha says, voice as infuriatingly calm as always. "Chances are they'll try again, likely with more manpower. We need to be prepared for that. They don't seem to care who or what they have to destroy in order to get back their master's toy."

Clint stands up abruptly. "I don't like this," he says, and begins to pace.

Natasha purses her lips and stares in his direction. "And what part, specifically, are you upset about?"

"What do you think?" he says. "It's bad enough that we're playing babysitter for him, but I am _not _risking my life to save him from some shitheads he's managed to piss off. I say we just punt him back to wherever he came from and let them deal with him. And how do we know this isn't another one of his stupid tricks, or some roundabout way of getting revenge? We beat the shit out of him last time he was in town; there's no way he'd be willing to just sit around and twiddle his thumbs when he could be slicing us into itty bitty pieces."

Rage bubbles up in Tony, and then he's standing, too, and his voice is ice. "Stop and think for a minute, _Agent Barton_. There are a couple of things you might not be thinking about: one, _have you fucking looked at the guy_? The sort of treatment that left him in this condition, in case you've been hiding under a rock, is _completely _unacceptable, no matter what crimes he's committed. Ever heard of 'cruel and unusual punishment'? This isn't just 'punishment', this is _torture_, and we are _not _the sort of people who are in the habit of throwing the people that piss us off back to the torturers – at least, _I'm _not, but, hell, Barton, I'm not so sure about you. Two, have you forgotten what that guy _did_ to those things? He _completely obliterated them_ even though he was _on the brink of death_, and from the show of it he clearly had enough power in his little finger to blast us all to smithereens, and yet, hey, guess who's alive to tell the tale? I don't know how you were faring against those giant demon-things, but my guess is not too great, because I sure as hell wasn't living up to my normally blemish-free reputation, and he _destroyed _them for us. Practically killed himself to protect us, in fact. If he has the good grace to martyr himself for us, we can at least give him the chance to recover and explain himself."

Clint crosses his arms and fixes Tony with a cold glare, lips pulled back into a snarl. "In case you forgot, he sort of blew up half of Manhattan last time he was here, and, oh yeah, let's not forget, he made me into his personal flying monkey!"

"And yet he came to us for help." Bruce, who had been standing half-slumped against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, steps forward. "He didn't go to Ásgarðr. He didn't go to the Chitauri. He came to _us_. We're the last people in the universe he should be willing to trust, and yet he's literally putting his life in our hands. There's something fishy about this whole situation, and until he wakes up, we're groping in the dark for answers."

Clint takes in a deep breath through his nostrils, muscles tense, eyes so hard they might have been carved from stone. Natasha rests a hand on his shoulder and says, softly, "you gave me a second chance, once." She doesn't say anything else, just looks at him, and for once in her life a genuine emotion blossoms to life beneath Natasha's skin; an emotion that swirls and shifts and is gone before Tony can get a good luck at it.

"Fine," Clint says eventually, the word spat out between clenched teeth. "_Fine_." And then he spins on his heel and exits the room, already reaching for his bow.

"He'll be fine," Natasha says, and there's a moment or two of awkward silence in which everybody watches him leave before their eyes shift back to Steve.

"So it's decided, then?" Steve asks. "He's under our protection?"

"Until he wakes up and we can properly decide how much of a threat he is," Natasha says, "yes. He's under our protection."

* * *

The third time Loki wakes, he has to physically drag himself toward awareness. He is exhausted when he opens his eyes, so tired he feels as though he could sleep for a lifetime. He enjoys perhaps thirty full seconds of pleasant numbness before the pain rushes back, all at once, and he tries, he really does, but he can't prevent the choked, strangled sound he makes, can't prevent the heat from building at the back of his eyes that forewarns the moisture tracking its way down his cheeks.

Minutes pass before he can think beyond the fire eating at his bones and his skin and his mind, seconds stretching into infinity as he counts them. Finally he's able to focus, to separate mind from body, but then he makes the mistake of twitching a finger and pain erupts not just in the appendage but _everywhere_. He's more prepared this time around and so he makes no sound of discomfort, merely grits his teeth and spends another agonizing eternity waiting for clarity.

When next he can properly think, Loki takes inventory of his surroundings as calmly as he can. He's lying prone on the softest surface he's felt in years, and he is warm and dry and _clean_. He's more comfortable than he has been in a long time. His entire body aches, yes, is tender and sore, and there is raw feel to his mouth, and whenever he so much as twitches a muscle pain flares up across every inch of him, but the pain is different. It's muted somehow, more distant; he is healing. Somewhat.

As carefully as he can, Loki pushes himself up into a sitting position. The movement ignites fire along his spine and his ribs and his stomach and oh, _gods_, his shoulders are in agony, his arms, _everything _– but he manages. He is gasping when he finally sits up straight, fresh tears mingling with the sweat on his face. Focusing on breathing evenly, he doesn't bother waiting for the pain to ease; instead, he delves into himself, burrowing under his skin and layers of muscle and bone and thought until he sits in his very center, calm and cool and dark. He reaches out tentatively, searching for the sources of his worst hurts, and immediately the litany of injuries begins to grow, and grow, and grow, until his dismay is almost overwhelming.

His injuries have been cared for to an extent – badly. Some part of him is expecting this; if all went according to plan, he's in Miðgarðr, and their medical technology is laughably childish. He'll have to heal himself if he wants his body to continue working properly. The broken bones themselves will nearly exhaust what little magic he has recovered; his ruined organs will have to be remade completely. His heart has an odd stutter to it and beats, at his count, a mere forty-two beats per minute. He'll have to rebuild its walls, repair its arteries, but more importantly he'll have to eat – _eat_? He can't remember the last time he was allowed to properly eat.

Letting out a long, slow breath, Loki surfaces and is completely unprepared for the white-hot fire that sears through his very blood as he does so. He grits his teeth and does all he can not to cry out, entire face clenching with the effort, until the worst of it has passed and he can think again. He is panting, sweat beading at his hairline and gathering under his arms. He shifts slightly, has to grab at the headrest to ensure that he doesn't fall off the bed, and nearly yelps with pain.

There are footsteps in the hall, voices. _No_. They're coming oh gods they're coming _it's them no please no _–

Loki shuts down that line of thought savagely. He is no longer in the hands of the Chitauri, he _knows _that – he remembers vaguely the effort it took to transport himself away from that barren rock, the energy which infused him with strength and the ability to ignore the pain, remembers destroying those who were sent after him with his borrowed magic. He is in Miðgarðr. He is in _Miðgarðr_, and those … _things_, they're gone. Gone _gone _they are _gone _–

The footsteps are nearing the door. Loki does not think before he narrows his eyes and thinks a single ancient rune. A barrier that hisses with gold-green sparks bursts into life at the door. For a minute after, his vision swims and silence roars in his ears, but the barrier holds. Loki smiles, ignoring the pain in his lips, confident his magic will last for the duration of his healing session. The smile slips into a panicked snarl as he looks down at his hand – there is a Miðgarðr contraption attached to the back of his hand by a thin silver needle which is dripping fluid into his veins. He rips it out, tearing his skin in his haste, and has to force himself to calm down afterwards.

Loki sucks in a breath through clenched teeth, closes his eyes, and reaches out with wisps of magic. _Ribs first_, he thinks grimly, because his broken ribs make even _breathing _painful, and there is an audible _snap _as his bones shift, splinter, and begin to weave themselves together again. He's snarling to keep from screaming, tears streaking his cheeks in hot waves, but he holds, keeps the stream of magic steady, focusing as best he can not on the pain but on knitting bone together again. When the last rib snaps back into place, he can't help but howl. Everything flashes white and the room tilts and whirls on its hinges, his ears fill with the roar of the wind, and he fights to keep himself centered, fights to keep his mind clear. A few minutes pass before he regains his vision and hearing well enough to note that there is a commotion outside, a panicking voice saying – something, something about him. He pushes it away, ignores it.

He next turns his attention to his left wrist, currently wrapped in some sort of hard material that itches at his skin. He takes only a moment to wipe the sweat from his eyes before disintegrating the material with magic. The skin of his wrist is mottled red and yellow and purple, and there is a healing wound along his forearm where bone broke through. Loki hisses out a breath, closes his eyes, and gets to work.

* * *

"What the hell is he _doing_?" Clint asks, and Natasha seems to be the only person with the presence of mind to actually answer his question. Tony, sitting in front of both of them closest to the screen, wishes he could open his mouth without his stomach threatening to remove all its contents. It's been another few days since Loki woke last, and this time he at least _seems _lucid – well, as lucid as one can be while doing weird magicky hullabaloo and making all sorts of deranged, pained noises.

"I think he's healing himself," she says, eyes narrowing as she leans in over Tony's shoulder to look more closely at the screen. "See? The bruises along his arms are fading." On Tony's other side, Clint leans in as well, then shuffles a step back.

"Wouldn't it make sense for there to be a little less … screaming involved if he was healing himself?" Clint sounds wary.

Natasha shrugs and straightens back up, crossing her arms. "Imagine you were going through surgery without anesthetics," she says, and then quirks at eyebrow at Tony's expression. "I'm fairly certain that's what it must be like for him right now."

On the screen, Loki slumps suddenly, the only indication that he's still awake the rapid up-down of his shoulders as he breathes. Then he raises his head and digs his fingers into his thigh, hands sparking with dark energy, tilts his head back, and doesn't just scream but _howls_.

"Okay, that's enough of that," Tony says, and he mutes the video. He closes his eyes and rubs a hand through his hair and has to take a few minutes to compose himself. Son of a _bitch_, just looking at the video makes his skin crawl. When he opens his eyes, he looks anywhere but at the streaming footage. Natasha, on the other hand, continues staring at the screen with a blank expression on her face, seemingly unable to look away.

"What's he doing now?" Natasha murmurs a few minutes later, and Tony's gaze snaps back to the screen before he can tell himself not to.

Loki is lying back, stretching himself out along the bed, wasted fingers grasping at his hips, then moving lower to settle themselves against the skin of his upper thighs. Loki's eyes are closed, and he breathes deeply, evenly, green-gold magic expelling itself from his nostrils with every exhale until it surrounds him completely. The magic undulates and shimmers for a few moments before sinking into his skin. Immediately, Loki's lips pull back over teeth in a wordless snarl, every tendon in his neck straining, hands twisting into claws, digging into his skin powerfully enough to draw blood.

"Remind me again why we haven't restrained his magic?" Clint asks.

"Thor said his magic would be the only chance he had at recovery." To Tony's left, Bruce sighs and continues, "he's healing himself as best he can. Once he's doing better, we can put some sort of restraining device on him. Thor promised to bring something back from Ásgarðr that would work."

"Speaking of the big guy, why the hell isn't he back yet? He's been gone for a couple of days." Tony crosses his arms over his chest and leans back in his chair, frowning. "He and his old man must really be going at it."

"He'll be back soon enough," Steve says. "He and his father have a lot to talk about."

Tony makes a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat and stares at the screen. Without sound, the video seems strangely unreal – as if this isn't happening, as if a certain God of Mischief isn't lying, broken and emaciated, on a S.H.I.E.L.D. infirmary bed. Loki finally stills, fingers easing up on their relentless grip, head lolling to the side as his eyelids slide shut.

"Well," Tony says after some time passes, the word breaking the silence and startling even Natasha, "now what?"

Steve pushes himself to his feet and folds his arms over his chest. "Now would be a good time to get a closer eye on him, don't you think? We should head down to the infirmary – we might be able to break through that barrier of his."

"Hold on. All of us?" Tony looks around at the gathered Avengers – Natasha, Clint, Steve, Bruce, himself – and raises an eyebrow. "If he wakes up, you realize he's going to flip a shit and blow us all to Kingdom Come, don't you?"

Steve frowns a little, as if he hadn't thought of that, and then slowly sits down again. "Alright, then," he says. "Tony, Bruce, you go figure out a way to get through that barrier, then report back to me."

"You got it, Cap'n," Tony drawls, and he stands up so quickly his head spins. He doesn't mind, though, walks out of that damn room as fast as he can, doesn't know if Bruce is following or not, just knows he needs to get out out out out _out_.

"Having a hard time?" Bruce asks, voice quiet, and Tony scoffs and then scoffs again, then falls silent, then erupts.

"A hard time? _A hard time_? Jesus, I don't – I don't even know, Bruce. It's like, this is like – it's me and Afghanistan, except times a million, and I'm on the other side, looking in, and the guy starring in the freak show is the god who threw me out of a _fucking window _and tried to take over mankind, and it's just – how does it even happen? Why _us_? Why does this happen to _us_? Why couldn't he have landed on, I don't know, the Planet of Unicorns and Happy Things and Soul-Rotting Candy, or something? I don't even know how to _feel _about what's happening."

Bruce waits patiently until Tony has calmed himself down sufficiently, until his heaving breaths have evened out. Then he says, "life is fucked up, Tony," and smiles.

And Tony just looks at him for a solid thirty seconds before he starts to laugh, so hard even his ears turn red and tears spring to his eyes. "See, Bruce," he says when he finally calms down, minutes later. "This is why I keep you around. Well, this and the whole science thing. Anyway. Lab?"

"Lab," Bruce agrees. "You have any idea how to break through this thing?"

"His magic has to be giving off a frequency, like how the scepter gave off gamma radiation – all we need to do is find the right frequency, disrupt the signal, and punch a hole through the sucker. Easy peasy. Child's play."

"Ah." A pause. "You do realize that I've been running diagnostics on the barrier ever since Loki set it up, and that the frequency it gives off is constantly mutating at several different wavelengths at the same time?"

Tony stumbles, briefly, but catches himself before he can fall. "_What_?"

"Yeah."

"_Shit_."

"Yeah. Any ideas?"

"Not yet," Tony admits, but already his eyes are gleaming and oh, yes, a _challenge_, he likes challenges, _loves _them, "but we'll figure it out. You and me, buddy, we got this one in the bag."


	4. Chapter Three

**Author's Note: **I'm not particularly happy with this chapter in any sense of the word, so some constructive criticism would really be appreciated! Also, much thanks to my anonymous reviewers - hugs for the lot of you.

* * *

INVICTUS

**Chapter Three**

Bruce knuckles his forehead and stifles a yawn, fighting the urge to close his eyes and keep them closed. It's been – well, he's not sure how long it's been since he and Tony locked themselves away in the lab, but through the front panels of the Helicarrier the night is black as pitch. There is the hum of the engines, the muffled roar of the great propellers, and little else; conversation between him and Tony trailed off some time ago, and now each is steadily burning their way through a list of what-ifs, met with failure each and every time.

Tony is muttering under his breath at a fast, clipped pace: Bruce recognizes snippets of equations intermingled with curses and nonsensical ramblings, and can't help but smile. Tony loathes quiet, he knows, and his mumbling has grown on Bruce in the past two years. He almost finds it endearing now – not quite pleasant, but annoying in the _'oh, aren't you cute' _sort of way as opposed to the kind of irritating that makes Bruce want to repeatedly smash Tony's face into something hard.

Taking a moment's respite from the bright glow of the holographic screen before him, Bruce allows his eyes to skitter across the contents of the lab. He's always preferred a tidy working space, but Tony seems unable to cope without having equipment and data strewn every which way. Whatever mess Tony makes is cleaned up by Bruce minutes later, and Tony seems to take sadistic pleasure in throwing Bruce's careful order to shreds. Their method keeps the two of them constantly on their toes, and surprisingly enough it actually bolsters creativity and Tony's self-described mad genius. It is, Bruce reflects, some sort of strangely accurate metaphor about their friendship.

Bruce stifles another yawn and turns back to the screen, blinking away the blur in his vision. Having met a dead end with his current theory on how to break through Loki's magic, he minimizes the screen and calls up the data that had begun streaming a few minutes after Loki magicked his barrier into existence. Bruce leans forward, hands atop the counter, settling most of his weight on his palms, and reads over the data once again. There must be _something _that he and Tony can do; Loki's magic can't just be changing frequencies at random, it _has _to be following some sort of algorithm or pattern …

But the first action Bruce and Tony had taken was to set the computer to searching for any algorithms, patterns, or repetitions, and there had been nothing of consequence, nothing that could help Bruce and Tony break down the barrier. But science isn't like that, science is hard fact and reliability, and Bruce is getting frustrated because there is _always _a law or an equation or a pattern to fall back on, and this just _doesn't fit_.

Sighing now, Bruce folds his arms across his chest and settles back to lean on the counter behind him and stares at the data without seeing. In the corner of his eye, Tony is rearranging data into concentric circles, frowning. He dispels the image. Starts blocking data into some three-dimensional rendering of a DNA strand, groans when something flashes red on his screen, mutters furiously, erases his work. Rubs a hand over his jaw and across his eyes and curses.

Bruce taps his fingers on his arm, intrigued despite himself by Stark's seemingly nonsensical actions, looks back at the data, and frowns. He needs to take a step back, look at the whole picture, see what angles he's missing, what he's not thinking of. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and thinks: _random. Pattern. Process. Thought. Instinct. Nature. Evolution. Human. Alive. Brain. Signal. Radiation. Gamma. Green. Hulk. Other. Angry. _He flows from one thought to the next without checking himself, allows whatever word that pops first into his head to trigger the next word, the next word after that, the next thought, the next flicker of memory, the next emotion, all completely random, flowing, alive, uniquely his –

Bruce's eyes fly wide open. "Tony," he says, and then, louder, when Tony doesn't respond, "_Tony_."

"Mmmwha?"

"We've been going about this completely the wrong way."

Tony blinks and straightens up miniscule degrees, eyebrows furrowing. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Tony, this isn't – this isn't inorganic or, or – or structured, it doesn't follow any patterns – "

"Bruce, c'mon. What're you trying to say? Work with me here. Words. Use your words."

"It's _random_. It's _completely random_. That's the _pattern_, Tony, it's like – it's words, like you said. Like that word association game – I say 'ice', you say 'cold', I say 'snowman'? Each word leads to the next, right? There are connections that we make, words with emotions or memories, and each person's associations are completely their own, and Tony, _this is the same thing_."

Tony's mouth is slightly open, eyes distant as he processes what Bruce said, and then realization and something like awe sparks and then he looks at Bruce, really looks at him, and says, "son of a bitch."

Breathless, grinning, Bruce nods. "His magic is _part of him_, Tony. It's _alive_." And then an idea strikes him like a blow to the gut; makes his mouth drop open and his eyes widen.

Tony bounds over to him in two steps flat, grabs him by the shoulders, shakes him. "I know that look. Tell me what's going on in that brilliant brain of yours, buddy, tell me what I need to know."

"We need to get to the infirmary," Bruce says. "It's not a machine, Tony. Can't be solved with equations or … or laws of physics or anything like that. It's – "

"Alive," Tony says, as if understanding it for the first time, mouth open in a silly grin and eyes wide and bright. "_Alive_. _Words_, Bruce, we need _words_, _that's _why we need to go to the infirmary – I'm right, aren't I? Of course I'm right. _Christ_."

The journey to the infirmary is a quick one; Bruce hardly notices it, is more concerned with the hammering of his heart and the sharp, excited bursts of Tony's breath, more concerned with _will it work will it work will it work?_ By the time they skid to a halt in front of the nondescript steel door, Bruce is fairly jittering with excitement, too tongue-tied to do anything.

Tony, on the other hand, clears his throat, steps up to the door, and says, "uh. Hi, Loki's magic … barrier … thing. Tony Stark here. Can I come in?"

There is a long stretch of silence, and then Tony's eyes go comically wide, entire body stiffening. "Tony?" Bruce asks, softly, afraid something's gone wrong – but then Tony lets out a long, ragged breath and says:

"Can't you feel that?"

"I … no. What is it?"

Tony opens and closes his mouth, then huffs a sort of breathy laugh that sounds half-mad. "It's … I can _feel _it. It's trying to figure out if I'm a threat. If I'm going to help him or not. Holy shit. This is … _ow! _Ow. Ouch. That stings – _ow!_"

"What's happening now?" Bruce's throat feels tight, his shoulders too stiff, and he is certain there is green tinting the whites of his eyes. But Tony is relaxing, his eyes still wide and that strange half-grin still on his face, and then the door pulses gold and green. Bruce, slowly, unclenches the fists he wasn't aware he'd made, then takes a wary step forward.

"Can we ... ?" he starts, is unable to finish.

Tony shrugs, grins in his direction, and says, "I don't know. Let's find out." And he steps up to the door, places his hand on the steel – green and gold sparks climb over his hand and Tony flinches briefly before letting out a surprised _oh_ – and then there is a strange sort of _shimmer _over the door, as if the energy clinging to it is falling away.

Bruce and Tony share a wide-eyed look and then they start to laugh. "I can't believe it," Tony says. "All this time, and we just had to _ask permission_?"

"He knew we'd spend hours trying to figure out if there was some way to disrupt his energy field," Bruce says, and he's smiling, shaking his head, trying not to laugh, because that's just … that's _genius_, because who in their right mind would try that? "He had to have known."

Inside, Loki is still and quiet in his unconscious state, and for once he's not bleeding out or on the cusp of death. Bruce experimentally unwraps several of the bandages around Loki's chest and abdomen and can't help but murmur in surprise when he finds that the wounds there – once raw and seeping and infected – have closed up and scarring over, well on their way to fading away. Loki's skin, while still a sickly pale gray, lacks the colorful assortment of bruises he'd been sporting.

Despite his rather remarkable healing session, Loki still looks more like a corpse than a living, breathing creature. By their measurement, Loki is six foot two and weighs a staggeringly low seventy-three pounds, putting his BMI solidly in the single-digits category. Casting an eye over Loki, looking not as a doctor but as a human being, Bruce feels a knot of disgust and pity tightening in his stomach. Sighing, Bruce unfolds his glasses and slips them onto the neck of his shirt, then looks over at Stark, who's chewing lightly on his bottom lip and frowning down at unconscious demigod.

"He's not going to respond well if he wakes up on the Helicarrier," Bruce says, and he raises his eyebrows so that Tony knows exactly what he's insinuating.

Tony clucks his tongue in agreement. "No. Probably not." There's a quiet moment. Then: "Fury's not going to like it."

Bruce laughs, shakes his head. "Since when have you _ever _cared about doing what makes Fury happy?"

"Point taken." Tony heaves a sigh, fixes the unconscious demigod with a cautious stare, then sighs again. "I'd better call Pepper and tell her to set up one of the guest bedrooms," he says finally. He pulls out his phone and starts tapping away at it, thumbs moving faster than Bruce thought humanly possible. When he puts his phone away, he says, "Fury's _really _not going to like this," and grins.

* * *

When he wakes this time, everything is different. He can tell, even before he opens his eyes, that he has been moved. The sheets and the duvet covering him are of a finer material, silky and smooth against his skin. Even the smell and texture of the air is different – it lacks the bitter aftertaste of the infirmary, is cool and fresh and clean. Even the distant thrum of engines is gone, and he is certain he's been taken off that strange floating craft of SHIELD's. He is disconcerted for a moment because he has no recollection of having been relocated, but there are no manacles, no gag, _nothing_. And when he realizes that the humming beneath his skin is his magic replenishing itself, he_ aches _with relief.

He draws in a deep breath through his nostrils, holds it, releases it out through his mouth. Experimentally, he twitches his fingers. When only a dull throb of pain crawls up his arm, he curls his hand into a fist, flexes it, and is rewarded with a sharper stab of pain. He grimaces.

In his earlier healing session, he'd been unable to heal all his injuries to completion. He'd set his injuries on the path to healing best he could; magic holds his knitted ribs together, keeps his flesh sealed shut, reinforces the weakened walls of his heart. If the spells fail, his ribs will shatter again, his skin will split and start to ooze, his heart will stammer and stagger through its beating once again. But, if the spells hold, they will allow for seamless healing with hardly a scar until his body is restored to its original pristine condition.

Loki lets out another slow breath and opens his eyes, then struggles up to a seated position. His new chambers are dim, but it is a simple enough matter of adjusting his eyes to take in more light, and then he is able to see as clearly as if the sun were streaming directly into the room. The quarters are spacious and furnished with elegant, sleek furniture: two armchairs embroidered in pale cream, a low table between them, a dresser, a tall mirror, even a bookshelf which is – to his surprise – well-stocked with what seems to be a wide variety of Miðgarðian literature. The bed is more or less in the center of the room, done to the same color scheme as the rest of the furniture: creams, pale gold, and a reddish-gold wood from a tree he's not certain the name of. There are two doors, and those he takes special note of; it is imperative he knows what options he has to escape.

The appearance of his surroundings makes him nervous – jailers do not give their captives such spacious, well-equipped cells without demanding something in return. Any moment now his new captors will barrel through that door and announce the conditions of his stay, the rules he will have to follow, the duties he will have to perform so that they do not hurl him back into the Chitauri's awaiting arms.

Loki brushes those thoughts away, lips aching as his grimace returns, then deepens. No. No, they won't. These so-called 'heroes' claim to be just and fair – at the worst, they will return him to Ásgarðr and he will be forced to serve out his punishment there, but he'd be _safe _in Ásgarðr –

(but he _isn't _safe in Ásgarðr, he knows that now. There's nowhere safe, nowhere to hide, _nowhere _that he can be free of that looming grin and no, no, _no_)

– if he is not safe in Ásgarðr, then _where_? He cannot protect himself in this state, not until his magic has been returned to its previous might and his body is well-nourished and healed properly. If Thanos arrives, he'll be powerless to stop him – and if the mortals decide that he needs to be punished for his actions, there is nothing he can do, _nothing _to prevent them from – what? Killing him? Death would, at least, be an escape from Thanos, would ensure he'd never again be subjected to Thanos's loving care …

But Thanos is a servant of Death and Death will never keep him from Thanos, not permanently, and if he dies it'll only be worse, everything will be worse. He won't go back, he _can't_ – Thanos's fury would ruin him, he knows that, and Thanos is far-reaching and he knows the workings of the universe, knows how to bend minds to his will, and what if he has already infected these mortals with his bidding? What if he knows, if he's already here, if he's coming to get him, lurking just around the corner ready to tear a scream from Loki's throat –

There is a knock at the door.

Loki can't prevent his reaction, the sudden locking of his muscles and the fear that sparks at the base of his spine and then plunges him into ice, the shrill need to _run away get away_. He can't breathe – the air is too heavy, too hot, and they're here and they're coming and he's not _safe _here he's not safe _anywhere _(_there will be no realm, no barren moon, no crevice, where he cannot find you_) but he needs to _calm down _he needs to _breathe _he needs to _think_.

Slowly, carefully, Loki draws in a deep, trembling breath, clasps his hands together to keep them from shaking. He swallows, opens his mouth, cannot summon the breath necessary to bring life to words. Swallows again, disgust and shame and anger crawling under his skin.

There is another knock at the door. "Um, hello? Sleeping Beauty? You in there?" _Stark_, is his first thought. And then: _sleeping beauty? _

Loki shoves away his confusion and arranges his face into a mask that he deems most suitable: hurt, vulnerable, with fear widening his eyes and stilling his frame. These mortals have such an affinity for fixing broken things, after all.

He doesn't have to fake the slight tremor in his voice when he rasps, "I am present." He hesitates, just now realizing that this will be his first lucid encounter with anyone since his arrival, wondering if Stark is there to attack him, drag him back to Thanos – but why would he knock, why bother with those idiotic epithets of his?

Silence for a few heartbeats. Then: "Right … you gonna let me in or no?"

Loki takes a deep breath, makes up his mind. "You may enter, if you wish." His voice is so quiet he expects that Stark will be unable to hear him, but then there's an affirmative noise from the other side of the door – the only warning Loki gets before the knob turns and the Iron Man himself is shouldering his way into Loki's quarters, carrying a tray containing a bowl of steaming soup.

"Hey, there, buddy, old pal," Stark says, and his words are almost like a song – snappy and insincere, but not quite sarcastic. His eyes tell the true story; they sweep over Loki, head to toe, narrowing with concern and wary caution before crinkling at the corners in a tight smile. "I bring the joy of my company and soup. You've somehow managed to lose four more pounds in the week you've been here – well, not _here_, here, you've only been in the Tower for a night, but you know what I mean. Anyone, the point is, you've lost weight. Which is, you know, nothing short of a miracle, seeing as a ten year old girl probably weighs more than you do."

Loki is, momentarily, thrown. He parts his lips in order to respond, but can think of nothing to say; of all things, _this_, concern – from Stark, nonetheless! – was not what he expected. The mortal had at least confirmed that he was no longer on that infernal flying machine – _the Tower_. Stark's tower, he assumes, though obviously renovated if he and his fellow heroes are willing to house him. After a few more heartbeats of silence, he ducks his head into an imitation of a bow. "Though I appreciate the hospitality you have offered me, at present I find I have no appetite. A glass of whatever, however, would be much appreciated." His throat, dry and chafed, renders his voice low and hoarse.

Although Loki keeps his eyes on his clasped hands, careful to keep an extra, wary hunch about his shoulders, he can tell that Stark is arching his brows. "I can get you some water, but you have to eat. Bruce's orders."

There is a sudden twist to Loki's stomach, and to his shame his throat clenches and heat springs to his eyes. They're going to _poison _him, they're going to watch him gulp down their offering like a starving beast, then laugh until their throats are raw as he hallucinates, screaming and sobbing, and no no _no _please _no_.

Loki clenches the duvet closer to him and addresses the bed, eyes low: "if at all possible, I would like to rest before taking in sustenance." Meek, humble, uncertain: _good_. He tries not to notice how easy it is to fall into this persona, how easy it is to pretend to be broken.

"Not an option. C'mon, head up, let's see those pretty green eyes."

Loki flinches, breath catching on a mangled sob. _No he wouldn't he can't he won't touch me he won't he won't he won't _please _no _–

"Whoa, um – okay." Without realizing it, he has started to shake, breath coming in ragged bursts. Stark's shadow falls across his vision and he recoils, hunches his shoulders, squeezes his eyes shut. "Whoa there, buddy, calm down. I'm not going to touch you. You're safe here. We're not going to do anything to you. Okay?"

He clasps his hands together to prevent them from shaking, tries to quell the shivering in his limbs and shoulders. It takes him close to a minute to control his breathing, to force the knot in his throat to dissipate. He nods, then tenses again as Stark's hands, bearing the tray, appear in his vision.

"Sorry. Um, just putting the tray on your lap. You can feed yourself, right? 'Cause I don't think that me spoon-feeding you would end well for either of us."

"I am more than capable of lifting a spoon to my mouth, Stark." Except his voice is quiet, lacking its lethal edge, and when he brings his hand to the spoon his fingers are trembling too badly to clasp it. The scent of the soup makes his stomach roil, and Loki is struck with a wave of nausea that sends him reeling, fighting to control his gag reflex.

Stark, it seems, is just standing by Loki's bed and watching. Loki feels his cheeks and ears heating, keeps his head ducked low so that Stark does not see the product of his embarrassment, and tries again.

This time, Loki manages to pick up his spoon, but he drops it a moment later. He can't eat he _won't _eat it's a trick it's a _trick _they're going to poison him kill him give him back to Thanos –

He chokes back a sob, turns it into a snarl, blinks furiously at tears.

"Alright, then," Stark says, drawing out the words, and a moment later the bowl disappears from Loki's vision as Stark's hands swoop in to pick it up. Unbidden, Loki's eyes follow the trail of motion until he is looking up at Stark, who's backed a few feet away. Stark is breathing the vapors of the soup in and making an appreciative noise in the back of his throat. "Chicken broth. _Mmm_. If you're not gonna eat it, I might as well. Can I borrow your spoon?" He takes it without waiting for a response, then shoves a spoonful of the broth into his mouth. He makes another exaggerated moan of approval. "_Mmm_."

Loki watches Stark closely for any hint of an adverse reaction, and when Stark does nothing but down another heaping spoonful of the steaming liquid, he relaxes minutely. The broth is beginning to smell almost good. He shifts slightly, and swallows.

Stark notices Loki watching, and raises an eyebrow. "Oh, _now _you want some? Yeesh, make up your mind."

Loki's heart crashes and settles somewhere in the pit of his stomach. Oh. Of course. Dangle the proverbial carrot in front of his damn nose – of _course _Stark would taunt him like this. _Pathetic_. Loki's eyes lower once again; he can _feel _his face tightening with rage and helplessness and shame, and no, no, he mustn't show Stark his anger, _must _keep it reigned in tight. Let the mortal eat his pathetic Miðgarðian meal and laugh with his friends about how he cowed the once-mighty God of Mischief, how he reduced chaos incarnate to a mess of tears …

Except then the bowl is lowered back onto his tray, its contents diminished but still lapping at the edges of the bowl as it rocks. Loki's eyes widen, and then his face snaps up so that his gaze can meet Stark's. He's adopted an impassive look, but Loki can see the guilt in his eyes and the _pity_. Loki grits his teeth so he doesn't snarl and picks up the spoon, and this time, _finally_, he can hold it. The first spoonful of hot liquid scalds his gums and burns the back of his throat, makes his stomach cramp, but, oh _gods _it is good to eat again.

It takes Loki twenty minutes to finish a little more than half of the broth, and then his stomach is so full he fears he might vomit. He pushes the tray away and says, "I can eat no more."

Stark eyes the bowl critically from his seat in one of the plush armchairs, which he'd dragged over to Loki's bedside as he waited for Loki to finish his meal. He puts down the cubical contraption he's been playing with and says, "you've hardly eaten anything."

Anxiety makes Loki's stomach twist – or perhaps that's just the unfamiliar sensation of hot food in a shrunken belly. "I have eaten as much as my stomach can handle. I cannot – I am sated, I do not require – "

Stark stands up, and Loki jerks backwards, overturning the bowl of still-warm soup as he does so, scrambling to put as much space between him and the mortal as he can. He pushes himself against the headboard and just then realizes he's babbling, words tearing themselves freely from his mouth: "_please_, I cannot eat any more, you – please, don't make me, I can't, I – I'm _sorry_, I am, please, I – I … I didn't – I – I'm _sorry_, truly, I did not mean to … to … "

Stark is staring at him, and there is something suspiciously akin to horror in his eyes. "Shit," he breathes, and then, "uh – um. Look, it's fine, you can't finish it, yeah, okay." Stark gathers the overturned bowl, ignoring the spilled soup, and deposits the tray on the floor. "See? No problem. Everything's A-Okay."

Loki clenches and unclenches his hands, struggling to breathe. To his relief, Stark stays quiet; there is a faint rustle as he sits back down and picks up his contraption to fiddle with. After a few minutes have passed, when his breathing is more even but he cannot yet bring himself to unfold his legs from his chest, Loki looks over at Stark to find him frowning down at his contraption. Desperate for something to take his mind off his racing thoughts and the panic still clenched tight around his stomach, Loki clears his throat to speak.

"That contraption," he says, and Stark looks up, startled. "What is it?"

"Oh, this? It's a Rubik's cube. It's a sort of puzzle we silly little mortals like to play with when we're not, you know, lamenting over our inferiority. This baby is the most complex cube out there – they call it _Over the Top_. Basically, you're supposed to make it so that each side is composed of entirely the same color, so this side is yellow, this side is green, yada yada, et cetera et cetera, any questions?"

"You don't seem to have made much progress."

Stark scoffs, twisting the Rubik's cube without looking. "I'd like to see you do any better. I'm a genius among geniuses, and even _I _say that this thing is practically impossible to do without reading up on how to solve it."

Loki hesitates, wondering just how much freedom he has. Then, quietly, "if you are willing, I would like to try."

"Sure, hey, whatever, anything to keep the deranged god entertained. Knock yourself out." Stark tosses the cube at Loki, who catches it reflexively and pointedly ignores Stark's crude words – Stark is uncomfortable, and rightly so, and is scrambling back to safer, more familiar ground. If he is being honest – and what a laugh that is, Loki Liesmith being _honest _– he is almost relieved by Stark's behavior. This is more along the lines of what he had expected from the mortal.

Loki peers at the cube, turning it this way and that, running his fingers over the ridges along which he assumes it twists. The cube is huge, nearly half a foot in length, depth, and width, and is a jumble of colors with seemingly no purpose – clearly, the result of Stark's fiddling. Loki frowns slightly as he tries to interpret the correct algorithm, doing his best to ignore the burning at the back of his neck and the prickling of his forehead which means that Stark is watching him. It would be best for the both of them if Loki did not comment on his excessive staring.

The algorithm seems clear to him after just a short while, and Loki suppresses a laugh at what these mortals call complex. Stark may be a genius among geniuses on Miðgarðr, but Loki is a genius among gods.

The first turn of the puzzle takes more effort than he thought it would, and realigning the pieces of the cube so that he can make the next turn is tedious, but he gets into the rhythm of the movement after the first three or four steps. Soon, his hands are moving deftly at a lightning-quick speed as he gains confidence, the puzzle sliding neatly along his chosen paths. Stark is making an incredulous noise in the back of his throat, but Loki ignores him. He is dangerously close to smiling.

Some five minutes later, Loki sets the completed puzzle down on his lap and looks over at Stark. The genius among geniuses is staring at him with eyes dangerously close to popping out of his skull, his shock clearly writ across his face.

"What the hell," Stark says. "Even the creator of that puzzle can't finish it anywhere near that fast, and _he made it_."

"This? It is an enjoyable puzzle, certainly, but not particularly challenging. I cannot imagine why it would take any longer."

"_Not particularly challenging_? Jesus Christ. You son of a bitch. Thor told us you were smart, but … _shit_."

Loki goes very still at the mention of Thor, muscles locking. He swallows, hard, and feels his stomach flop over unpleasantly. He doesn't have to paint an expression of unease upon his face; his emotions are already outlined clear as day in the furrow between his brows and the tension at the corners of his lips, in the sudden lines around his sunken eyes. "You haven't yet said," he says, and he lowers his eyes from Tony's – _submissive, wary, respectful_, he reminds himself, and he fiddles with the duvet to further his nervous image. "What is to be done with me? Am I to be held in these quarters without leave? Tortured? Enslaved?"

"Jesus _Christ_, no!" Stark stands up abruptly and begins to pace, and Loki hides a smirk by tucking his chin into his chest, shrinking in on himself. "That's _not _how we do it here on Earth, or Miðgarðr, or whatever the hell you want to call it. Okay? We don't just … _imprison _people without giving them a trial, and we certainly don't fucking _torture _or _enslave _people, okay, we're not _like _that. _Christ_."

Loki swallows a nugget of smug elation, wrestles it into submission, then says, softly, "and you will not … you would not … the Chi – the Chitauri, you would not – "

Stark's voice is sharp, insistent. "We would _never_ hand you back over to those monsters. _Nobody _deserves that. _Nobody_. Not even you." Loki is, briefly, taken aback, and he allows it to show on his face: surprise and relief and dawning hope.

"So I am … to remain here?"

Stark shrugs. "For all intents and purposes you've served your sentence and are on the run, so you could qualify for some sort of … intergalactic political asylum, or something like that. As soon as you feel strong enough to walk, you're going to have to get debriefed by Coulson and Fury and all that fun stuff, and then we'll all get together and figure out what to do with you. Thor went to go yell at your dad – "

"He is _not _my father," Loki hisses, is unable to stop the sharp words from spilling over, but Stark dismisses his words with a nonchalant wave of his hand rather than remarking on Loki's sudden fury.

"Right, adopted, well, Thor went to go yell at _his _dad, because apparently Odin's been telling Thor you were locked up safe and sound deep in the Quiet Isle or the Silent Isle or the whatever."

Loki's stomach twists and heaves until bile stings at the back of his throat. "He what?" His voice is a croak.

"Odin never told Thor you'd escaped or been kidnapped or, you know. Anyway." Stark averts his eyes and falls silent.

Cold seeps over Loki's skin until he is frozen where he lies. Odin _saw _him being taken, he _knew _Loki hadn't gone willingly, and yet – and yet he hadn't told Thor, he'd kept it a secret, he'd sent _no one _after Loki, _no one_, he'd left him to die, he'd left him to torture and rape and terror at the hands of the Chitauri. He hadn't even cared enough to send out a damned search party.

"He didn't tell Thor," he repeats, and he hardly recognizes his voice: dull and listless and flat.

Stark shifts his stance and clears his throat. "'Parently not."

Loki squeezes his eyes as tightly shut as they can go, not even bothering to prevent the hot sting of tears from forming behind his lids. _Odin doesn't care. He doesn't care. Of course he doesn't. He's the Allfather, the King of Ásgarðr and the Nine Realms, the killer of thousands upon thousands of Jötnar, and I'm the Jötunn runt, the cast-aside son of Laufey, the second son the forgotten son the _disgusting _son the _hated _son_. _Unworthy of his attention, unworthy of his care. He was most likely _happy _to have me taken from him, _grateful _for his chance to wipe his hands clean of my supposed sins once and for all._

Loki takes a deep breath, composes himself, and when he looks back up at Stark his eyes and cheeks are dry. "If it is allowed," he says, chokes out, rather, his tongue numb and his throat convulsing as he tries to swallow past the lump within it, "I would like to bathe."

Stark nods in the affirmative, sniffs, then cocks his head to the side. "Sure, yeah. Okay. You stink. Know how to work a shower?"

"Pardon?"

"Is Earth _really _so strange a place that you aliens aren't even familiar with the concept of _showers_?" Stark heaves a sigh and shakes his head. "Shower: mortal method of bathing. You turn a knob, water spouts out of the showerhead. The bathroom's in through that door over there. I could turn on the shower for you, or leave you to figure it out for yourself. Your choice."

"I have proven myself capable enough of puzzling out this _Over the Top _contraption. I'm certain that a Miðgarðian bathing vessel cannot be too difficult."

Sure enough, the shower is easy to figure out after a bit of fiddling; it's _getting _to the shower that's the difficult part. It takes Loki nearly ten minutes to make it out of his bed, stumble fifteen feet to the adjoining bath chambers, and then struggle out of the Miðgarðian clothes he has been supplied with. He refuses Stark's help, and after a few minutes of unhelpful sarcastic commentary and general snarky observations, Stark takes his Rubik's cube and leaves, telling Loki just to call out for someone named Jarvisif he needs help with anything.

Loki finds that, upon getting into the shower, his legs no longer have the strength to hold him up, and so he curls into a seated position beneath the path of the scalding water, tilts his head back, and reaches for the soap.

He scrubs himself all over, not just once or twice but dozens of times, until his skin is pink and raw and tender to the touch. The feeling of his hand anywhere near his groin is enough to make him flinch and bite back a whimper, but that is just an incentive to scrub harder, to get out the filth that's been beaten into the very essence of his being. Instead of reaching for a bottle of liquid scented soap Miðgarðians call shampoo he scrubs the soap through his hair, over and over again, practically yanking out his brittle locks in his haste.

By the time he is done, the soap is a mere sliver of its former self, and he is shivering badly despite the heat. He is unable to conjure the energy necessary to stand up, turn the water off, and dry himself, so he curls into a tight ball and lets the water pound onto his skin. He stares down at the white porcelain beneath his toes, so weary he feels he will never be able to move again.

He stays like that for perhaps an hour, until finally his body moves of its own accord: stands up and ignores the light-headed dizziness and black vision that accompanies the movement, turns off the water, reaches for a soft towel hanging nearby. He pats himself dry, wraps himself in the towel – it is huge, large enough to wrap around his body three times with enough material to spare, and long enough to reach well past his knees – and then goes to stand in front of the mirror, mercifully steam-free due to some sort of air circulation device in the chambers, and looks himself in the eye for the first time in far, far too long.

He looks, to be blunt, awful.

The face staring back at him in the mirror is a skull, cheekbones jutting out, cheeks so hollow that the outline of his teeth can just be seen beneath his flesh. His eyes are sunken and surrounded by bruised-looking flesh. His hair is scraggly and too long for his liking, well past his shoulders, thin, brittle. When he lifts a hand to his hair and pulls it through, clumps of hair come with it. In the mirror, his hand belongs to a skeleton, not a living, breathing person.

Loki doesn't register the journey back to his bed, doesn't remember burrowing beneath the layers of comforters or tucking his head beneath his arms. He is weary and exhausted but not tired, numb but aching – even now the bed seems too hard against his bones, his skin overly sensitive to the texture of the sheets. He does not sleep, does not close his eyes, but huddles in the darkness and clings to himself, fingers digging into flesh, breaching skin, letting the poison inside him escape.

* * *

**Author's Note 2: **Re: Loki ... I wanted to write him in a way that got across the point that his emotions are very out of whack right now, that he's very confused and unsure and sort of shocked at being back in Real Life, but his POV section just seems ... muddled. I'd appreciate whatever help any of you are willing to offer.


	5. Chapter Four

**Author's Note: **Sorry for the wait; this chapter's been a bit of a doozy to write. That and I was sort of freaked out beyond belief by the amount of attention this story was getting, so I had to take a couple of days to calm down and not start panicking every time I so much as looked at the Word document. Also, I apologize sincerely for any and all mistakes in this chapter - I'm about to go away for five days without wifi, and I just wanted to get this chapter up instead of making you all wait another week. I'll edit the chapter again as soon as I get back, which will be next Wednesday. I'm not positive if I'll have time to write the next chapter while away, but I'll do my best. As always, constructive criticism is more than welcome.

* * *

INVICTUS

**Chapter Four**

Mjölnir slams into the jaw of a Frost Giant with enough force to send the Jötunn flying, connecting with a crunch that rings like a song in Thor's ears. His blood is pounding and his arm is numb from wielding Mjölnir, his side is throbbing and he's sure he's covered in blood: the rich red of the Æsir, the dark purple of the Frost Giants, splattered across his face and armor and painting his hammer in ropes of liquid and gore. He has long ago lost any semblance of time. The sky is gray and the horizon is bleak and all around him seethes an unending sea of Jötnar, and that is all he knows, that is all he's ever known.

Off in the distance, Sif is wielding her double-bladed staff with deadly precision, splattering the snow around her with the blood of her victims. Her face is grim and taut with exhaustion but still she battles on, cutting down one Jötunn after the other, ignoring the gash in her thigh. In the rare event that she stumbles due to her injury, Volstagg – hardy, powerful Volstagg whose face has lost any indication of good cheer – slams his axe into the skull of the encroaching Frost Giant, more often than not taking its head off its shoulders. When this happens, he roars in victory, claps his axe against his breastplate, and then raises his axe against the next enemy which crosses his path.

Hogun and Fandral are closer to Thor, as dissimilar in their fighting styles as night and day. Hogun is quick and efficient, aiming for arteries with his throwing knives, crushing his mace into the knees of the Frost Giants that swarm around him, then felling them when they stumble. Fandral attacks in broad, sweeping movements, lopping off limbs, blade sliding into the bellies of the Jötnar and spilling their guts. The two of them together are unstoppable, their movements cohesive and somehow as one, the result of over a thousand years of camaraderie and fighting alongside one another. Thor sees them, but does not worry despite the many wounds they have both accumulated; they are in the midst of battle lust, and, like Sif, they do not allow their injuries to impede their skill.

A Frost Giant looms in Thor's vision and with a roar he sends Mjölnir flying towards it, waits until it has crunched into the Jötunn's skull, and the skull of the Jötunn behind it, and the Jötunn behind _that _one, before finally recalling Mjölnir to his hand. When the heavy weight of his most trustworthy weapon slams into his palm, he smashes Mjölnir against the ground to split the earth and send a funnel of rock toward a cluster of Jötnar not far away. The rippling of earth hits true, and as soon as Thor sees his attack through to completion he spins, spies his newest victim, and with a grunt sends Mjölnir spinning through the air to take off the top of the Frost Giant's skull.

_We should have anticipated this_, some sane, rational part of Thor unaffected by bloodlust thinks. And it is true; they should have. He had arrived in Ásgarðr four days previously with fire singing in his veins and Odin's name on his lips, ready to accuse, ready to take up arms against his father in Loki's name. He had been greeted by his anxious mother who had told him there was trouble with Jötunheimr – Heimdall had heard plans of dissent, had seen the turmoil growing under King Býleistr, and Odin had taken an envoy of warriors with him to confront the young king. Since then Heimdall had lost all sight of Odin and his envoy, had lost even the ability to peer through the shrouds of space into Jötunheimr itself.

Thor had wasted no time in gathering the Lady Sif and the Warriors Three, telling them simply that he needs must speak with the Allfather, and that they in all haste must travel to Jötunheimr. They had without question or complaint armed themselves and packed for the journey: healing stones; bread, meat, and mead; and thick blankets to keep the worst of the cold away while they slept. The first few days they spent in Jötunheimr they had found nobody; no Frost Giants to welcome them, no camps, no indication whatsoever that Odin and his envoy had passed through these wretched wastelands. And then, this morning – or perhaps late last night, for in Jötunheimr there is no true difference between the two other than a minute lightening of the gray-blue-black sky – they had attacked. Come swarming out of underground passages hidden by a fresh blanket of snow and draping shadows, their ice blades flashing, voices roaring as one.

With another grunt, Thor slams the head of his hammer into a Frost Giant's thigh, cutting its legs out from beneath it. It topples with a howl, and then Thor lifts Mjölnir up, up, brings it crashing down on the monster's skull. When he raises Mjölnir again, there are shards of bone and chunks of brain matter glistening all along his hand and forearm. A flare of savage pride hums along his spine, tightens his grip on Mjölnir's handle, and then he _roars_, and the sky above roars with him. Black clouds tighten and twist, the wind scorching across the surface of the wastelands. Electricity is rising within him, dancing along his skin, making the hair on his arms and jaw bristle outwards, and he remembers, just in time, to shout a warning to his companions before a bolt of lightning splits the sky and races toward his outstretched weapon.

Thor embraces the white-hot flare of power, keeps it in close under his skin, behind his eyes, and he knows he's practically glowing with the effort of tethering nature's will to his own. He waits until he is sure Sif and the Warriors Three have disengaged from the fight and fallen back before he tugs on that tether and _pushes_, hard, and lightening scorches out from Mjölnir and strikes the ground with so mighty a blow that the earth itself shatters. The lightning tears through the earth and the shrieking Frost Giants, shredding rock and ice and flesh alike.

Thor calls another bolt of lightning to himself before the scattered forces can recover, and this time he slams Mjölnir itself against the ground, flinging the energy away, out, racing toward the struggling forms of the Frost Giants, earth rippling and tearing and thundering its dismay. In but a handful of heartbeats, there is silence save for the pounding of Thor's blood in his ears, numbness save for the burning in his side and arm, and he can do nothing but sink to his knees and gasp out through his open mouth.

Through the thunder of his heart pulsing in the thin membrane of his ears, Thor is aware, distantly, of the crunch of ice which indicates footsteps. He does not worry; he recognizes those footsteps as well as he recognizes the sound of his voice, and he knows that he and his companions are safe.

"Thor," Sif says once she gets close enough, her voice strained and raw and soft. "We have to get out of the open."

Thor nods and heaves himself to his feet, blinks blood out of his eyes, and looks over Sif and the Warriors Three. Their bloodlust is draining, leaving them swaying on their feet and exhausted, arms limply at their sides. Experimentally, Thor lifts his right arm and find that his shoulder aches so severely he can hardly lift it above his head.

"Sif is right." Thor grimaces at a sudden throb in his side, knowing that a muscle has likely been torn open by the freezing edge of a Jötunn's blade. He casts his eyes about the surrounding peaks, looking for any shallow dips in the snow or curved shadows that could hint at a cave, somewhere safe from the wind and the prowling Frost Giants. "Hogun," he says, and the grim-faced warrior lifts his chin in response, awaiting direction. "You are swift, and among us have suffered the least injury. You will scout ahead. Keep your footsteps soft and your weapons at hand at all times; the further we get into Jötunheimr, the more cautious we must be. Report back to us if you find a suitable shelter, or if there is danger ahead."

"Aye," Hogun says. The hand in which he holds his mace tightens, turns white-knuckled, and then he is bounding off into the snow, light-footed and silent and grim, a flicker of shadow in the corner of Thor's eye and nothing more.

Thor eyes Sif, Fandral, and Volstagg, taking in the deep gash on Sif's thigh bound with a portion of her bloodied cloak, the lacerations and bruising developing along Volstagg's forehead and arms, the dark blue frost-burn dotting Fandral's neck and the blood smeared across his breastplate. "Stay close," he says, gripping Mjölnir tighter, and then he sets his jaw and paces forward into darkness.

They walk for what feels like hours, time slipping through their fingertips and shattering beneath their feet. Thor's neck crawls and perspiration gathers beneath his arms, his chest taut and breath burning in his lungs, and he's certain they're being watched, that they are surrounded, that any moment now the Frost Giants will come barreling out of their lairs with ice weapons already forming on their limbs. But they are alone, alone out in the cold and the snow and the ice

(_like Loki must have been, once, just a babe, abandoned and left to die_)

and Thor wishes, oh, he _wishes _he could strike into the very heart of Jötunheimr and deliver death itself unto Býleistr, rescue his father and his father's men – but he is injured and he has not slept well this past week and he is _exhausted_, and his father must wait for now.

The sky darkens by a shade, casting the frozen landscape into a deeper hue of blue as if the land itself has been bruised. The cold, already bitter, seems to bite into Thor's very being, stabbing at his lungs and throat, rendering his hands and feet – even in their thick fur-lined gloves and boots – numb. Fandral is perhaps fairing the worst of the four of them; he is shivering so badly his teeth knock together, and Thor has to bite back the nausea that rolls in his stomach when he remembers that not long ago he was watching Loki shiver, watching Loki convulse and vomit blood and his brother his _brother _what _happened _to his brother, and he doesn't want to think about it, doesn't want to, can't, won't, but he _is_, and it hurts it hurts it _hurts _and there is a tightness to his throat, a heavy hand twisting his gut that wasn't there a moment ago, and is he okay and has he woken up yet and will he recover and why is Thor so _useless_ when it comes to helping his baby brother?

Movement flickers in the shadow and Thor rears up, flinging his arm back to push Fandral and Sif and Volstagg to safety, he's readying Mjölnir for an attack – and from the shadows, Hogun's voice hisses, "be calm! I am no enemy." Thor squints into the darkness until Hogun's form reveals itself, shadows unwrapping themselves from his frame until Thor is sure, absolutely, positively sure, that it's really Hogun and not a trick.

Minutely, Thor relaxes. "Hogun. You are a pleasing sight, my dear friend. Have you found shelter?"

"Aye," Hogun says, and for a moment he stands still, looking over Thor and his bedraggled companions, and then he gestures with a sharp jerk of his chin back in the direction he came. "This way. It is but a ten minute walk from here."

Thor manages to summon the energy necessary to grin and clap Hogun on the back. "I could kiss you," he says, echoing one of Tony's favorite phrases, and grim-faced Hogun raises one eyebrow – an indication of utmost shock. Thor does nothing to ease his surprise, but instead grins broader and squeezes Hogun's shoulder once more before letting go. "Lead on, my friend. Let us finally be rid of this wretched cold before Fandral's most prized possession withers up and dies."

"It is, I'm afraid, too late for that," Fandral says with a long-suffering sigh as the group begins to walk again. "I can't even _feel _my cock. The ladies of Ásgarðr will mourn for years to come."

"Mourn the chance to laugh at that pitiful thing you call a cock, more like," Sif says, and she laughs quietly when Fandral huffs in condescension and crosses his arms.

"Your jealousy is unbecoming of you." Fandral sniffs, holds his chin high, and watches Sif with half-closed eyes over his shoulders. "If you are so eager to witness firsthand what I've between my legs, dear Sif, you need only ask."

"I've seen what lies between your legs, and I've no need to see it again. It is a rather ugly specimen," Sif says, and their continued banter – peppered with Volstagg's occasional insulting remarks – warms Thor's heart and makes the time flow by faster. Thor _should _tell them to keep their tongues in their mouths, _should _tell them that they are in enemy territory and therefore in danger, but their voices are swallowed by the roar of the wind and muffled by the blanket of snow lying thick and heavy upon the ground, and it is _nice _to have a light-hearted conversation and chuckle with friends.

The cage that Hogun found has a narrow entrance hardly big enough for Volstagg to squeeze through on hands and knees, but the interior widens considerably until it is just wide enough for five warriors to lie down side-by-side. Hogun lights a dim lantern so that the pitch blackness of the interior recedes somewhat, just enough so that Thor can see. The ceiling is perhaps a bit low – when Thor stands, he has to duck to ensure he does not slam his forehead against rock – but when sitting, it is wonderful. The small mouth of the cave ensures that the interior remains warm, practically toasty compared to the freezing conditions of Jötunheimr, and the close quarters cause for an easy – and much appreciated – distribution of body heat.

Sif is kneeling closest to the entrance, rubbing her gloved hands together as she peers out into the snowstorm. "We should pile up snow at the entrance," she says, glancing back over her shoulder at Thor. "That will ensure the heat stays in, and will hide us from any suspicious eyes."

"Oh, just leave it," Volstagg says, groaning as he settles back and makes himself comfortable against the unforgiving rock. "The storm will cover the entrance soon enough. I'm of the mind that we sup, heal, and get some sleep, in that order."

"Besides," Fandral continues, "Volstagg could hardly squeeze himself through the entrance. What makes you think that a Frost Giant could get in?"

"Frost Giants can manipulate ice, you _idiot_. Honestly, Fandral, your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage."

"If this is how you speak to all men, it is no wonder you've got cobwebs growing between your legs – "

"Better cobwebs than a festering worm."

"Oh, we're back to this, then? Strange, Sif, that you spend so much time imagining what gift the gods have presented me with."

"I need not imagine. Do you not remember how many times I've had to come to your rescue as you fled, naked, from the arms of a man you thought to be a maid?"

"And what beautiful maids they were," Fandral says, and he's got a dreamy sort of smile on his face. "Perhaps when this is over I shall find the one they call Jórunnr and take her into my bed."

Sif raises an eyebrow and says, "Fandral, Jórunnr is a man."

"A man dressed as a maid. Hence, should he – I'm sorry, should _she _not be considered a woman? A most beautiful woman, with skin dark as ebon and hair the black of midnight. She has a friend, dear Sif, a man by the name of – "

"I care not for associates of yours." Sif looks amused more than annoyed, though, and when she takes a healing stone for herself she passes another to Fandral.

Thor absentmindedly crumbles a small healing stone over a thin wound on his forehead, wincing slightly as his skin overheats and pulls itself back together. Truth be told, Thor is not paying much attention to the conversation. He allows the familiar lilt of his friends' voices to drown out the thunder in his skull, but their words – although he hears the slope of their vowels well enough – have no meaning. It is as though he's listening in on a conversation spoken in tongues he does not understand.

Sighing, Thor settles forward onto his knees and begins the complicated process of relieving himself of his armor. Volstagg is speaking now, seems to be recounting some tale regarding his insatiable appetite. His voice booms and then squawks – Sif is reprimanding him, telling him to keep his voice down – and then he continues in a loud whisper, and that's not loud enough, that's not nearly enough to keep out the words rattling around in Thor's head. His fingers touch rough skin, the scabbed-over wound a Frost Giant had left him with, and pain twinges at his side – and yes, good, because pain will keep his mind off what's waiting for him back in Avenger's Tower, will keep his mind off the haunting stare of his brother and the way his cold fingers had curled around Thor's, how his body had felt nestled in Thor's arms –

(and _how can he be so thin _and _what happened to him _and _why did Odin lie _and he can picture it, the jut of bone against paper-thin skin, the translucent lids marbled with blue veins, and his _blood_, so much _blood _how could there be so much blood from so small a vessel?)

There is a savage twist of pain in Thor's side and he grits his teeth against the startled gasp that nearly makes its way out of him, and when he looks down at his hand his fingers are red with blood and his wound is bleeding anew.

"You idiot, Thor, you're not supposed to pull the scabbing off!" With a disgusted snort, Sif leans closer to Thor and presses her hand gently against the wound, completely unperturbed by the scent and sight of blood. She rolls her eyes and holds out her free hand toward Volstagg. "Get me a piece of cloth from a blanket. I care not whose it is."

Volstagg does as she bids, tearing off a sizeable strip of fabric from a thickly knit white blanket. Sif wads up the fabric and presses it against the wound in Thor's side, holding it firmly against his skin. "You know," Sif says, voice almost conversational, "you've been very distracted since your arrival on Ásgarðr."

"Sif speaks the truth." Fandral raises his eyebrows, schooling his features into one of admonishment. "Come. Tell us, Thor, what is it that eats at you so?"

Thor's head is shaking, back and forth, _no nothing_, before he can stop himself. "My friends," he says, and even to him the nonchalance in his voice seems forced, "truly. I am fine. My thoughts have been busy as of late, yes, but there is nothing of true importance that holds my attention."

"Lady troubles, then," Fandral says with a heaving sigh. He seems to be about to say something else when Hogun cuts in, voice dry and emotionless as ever.

"Lies have always been your brother's domain, not yours. You have no skill in it."

"True enough," Volstagg says, raising his eyebrows. "Speak truly, Thor. We are curious."

"It is nothing – "

Sif applies more pressure to his wound and he breaks off mid-sentence, grinding his teeth together so as not to groan in pain. "Enough of that, Thor," she says. "We've come with you to Jötunheimr without complaint, without _question_, we do not ask why you wish to speak to the Allfather or even why your need to do so is so dire; all we ask is what it is that troubles you."

Thor's breath dies in his throat, leaving him dry-mouthed. The ache in his side is nothing compared to the hollow pain in his chest, as if his heart is being peeled back to reveal nothingness. He has been friends with Sif and the Warriors Three for practically his entire life, but they have no love for Loki – they've ever seen him as a burden and a nuisance – and he feels, suddenly, that speaking aloud of Loki's trauma would make it too real, too close, and he doesn't want to think about Loki or how he sacrificed himself to save Thor or the tears in his eyes when he fell (let go, jumped does it _matter_?).

The smile Thor attempts ends up looking more like a grimace, too tight and hard to be reassuring. "I shall tell you in time," he says, voice soft, "but not tonight, my friends. When this is over, I swear to you that I will relay what plagues me; but, until then, let me keep my silence."

Sif looks displeased, her mouth hardening and her brows drawing over her eyes sharply. Beyond her, Fandral is worried, teeth worrying at his lower lip, and Volstagg's frown is lost in the tangles of his red beard. Hogun's face, as ever, is a blank slate.

"We will take your word for it," Hogun says when nobody else's voice is forthcoming.

"But only reluctantly," Sif grumbles, and then she wads up the bloodied cloth and throws it aside with more force than is necessary.

Over the course of the next half hour, the rest of Thor's wounds are attended to and the bellies of all five warriors are filled with the simple but hardy foodstuffs they'd packed for the journey. Armor off and piled in one corner, the five of them lie down side-to-side, piling the blankets they'd brought atop themselves. There is hardly enough room to fit, but Thor doesn't mind; the heat of Volstagg on his right and Hogun on his left is more than welcome, for, though the cave is warmer than the wastelands of Jötunheimr by far, their shelter is not nearly warm enough to chase the chill from their bones.

The other four warriors drop off soon enough, exhaustion weighing their eyelids shut. Though Thor is so tired he feels physically sick, the need for sleep coiling in his belly and pounding behind his eyes, he cannot fall asleep. In the darkness his thoughts are too loud, the visions of his brother lying pale and bloody and broken too vivid for him to ignore. Again and again he sees the terror on his brother's face when those _beasts _came for him, feels the panic that had clamped his throat shut and squeezed his chest and set fire to his skin when he thought Loki had gotten himself killed.

Thor squeezes his eyes shut and rolls onto his side. His chest is pressed against Volstagg's girth now, his nose filling with the scent of blood and sweat and the sour undertones of old mead. When they were young, when Loki suffered from nightmares so terrible he would be inconsolable upon waking, he and Loki would sleep like this; Thor's chest to Loki's back, his arms around his little brother, keeping his demons away. And now? What of now? Loki has always been predisposed to uneasy sleep and night terrors, and now he is alone in a strange place with a lifetime's worth of nightmare-fodder taken up residence in his skull, and he will wake screaming and Thor will be unable to help, and to whom will he go if his nightmares bleed into reality? If he is in need of comfort and the reassurance of safety?

Clenching his hands, Thor squeezes his eyes tighter until they hurt, desperate to black out the images playing in his mind and silence the questions going round and round and round.

Nearly an hour passes before Thor can finally slip into the comfort of sleep's arms, and even then his sleep is troubled. He dreams of being entangled in chains while somewhere far, far away his brother is howling, screaming, pleading for his brother to _help_, to _save _him, and Thor is _trying_, he is, he's _trying_, but the more he struggles the tighter the chains get, tighter and tighter, and they are snaking around his neck, until his throat is crushed and his eyes are bulging out of the socket with the pressure but he's still fighting, even as black creeps over his vision and Loki's screams fade to hoarse sobs and no, _no_, Loki, _please _–

In his sleep, Thor's breath comes as a strangled moan, tears hot and prickling at the back of his eyes. Next to him, Hogun frowns in his sleep and twitches, rolls closer to Thor until Thor is cocooned by warm flesh. In his dreams, fire ignites in his head and splits his skull and Loki is there, fingers threading through Thor's, and Loki is crooning, "_shh, brother, I am safe, I am well," _and the fire dims to a warm glow and the feeling of two hearts beating as one.

* * *

It's July nineteenth, eight-thirty-seven AM on a Saturday, it's a blistering ninety-six degrees in New York City, and Clint officially wants to fucking shoot somebody. And really, it's way too goddamn early to want to shoot somebody, but, hey, that's what his life has come to.

Currently Clint's chowing down on a plate of eggs (soft and buttery and, wow, he's missed real food after being on the Helicarrier for a week) and guzzling coffee and trying very, very hard not to think about the puppet master currently curled up in a guest bedroom in Avengers Tower. So far, Tony's been the only one to go see him. It was decided that Loki wouldn't react well to being in the same room as the man with the giant green ragemonster hiding under his skin, or the big buff blonde guy who could knock him out in a heartbeat, or the redhead assassin who just _oozes _comfort and joy rather than death and threats and more death. Nobody had even considered sending Clint. Which is … well. Clint can't decide if that's good or bad. On the one hand, good because Clint won't be faced with the overwhelming temptation to shoot the sonuvabitch. On the other hand, bad because Clint won't get to accidentally-on-purpose shoot the sonuvabitch.

Clint stuffs the last forkful of eggs into his mouth followed by half a piece of toast and washes it all down with a long gulp of coffee (very black and very sweet). He almost chokes to death, but that at least gives him something other to think about than the _fucking megalomaniac who used him for his own goddamn puppet show _currently sleeping downstairs.

He's grinding his teeth. Loudly. He forces himself to relax his jaw, take another (smaller) sip of coffee, and then count to ten. He's had weirder assignments than this, right? (Wrong). He's been in more difficult situations than this, yeah? (No goddamn way). He's not going to take his bow and shove an arrow into that slaving douchebag's eye, oh, no no no. (He wishes).

"Dear god, I have finally gone crazy," Clint says, addressing the air.

"Crazy is an ableist term," Natasha says, cool and calm as always, and _fuck_, Clint's always hated that she can sneak up on him like that. He doesn't bother telling her this because she already knows; he can see it in the faint upward curve of her mouth and the glint in her slightly-narrowed eyes, and he doesn't know if he loves that expression or hates it.

Clint mumbles her name in greeting and then stares into the depths of his mug as if the dregs of his coffee hold the secret to everlasting tranquility. A few feet away, Tasha is pouring black coffee into her mug. A few floors below, there is That Guy whom Clint very much so wants to stick a knife into. _Christ_.

"I'm going crazy," Clint says aloud, and Tasha turns to him, somehow looking perfectly poised while taking a long sip of coffee. Clint blames the eyebrows. There's nothing Tasha can't do with them. Sometimes it makes him want to shake her, or demand she teach him just how in the hell she _does _that, and sometimes it makes him want to do … other things.

"You're repeating yourself," Tasha says.

Clint groans and slumps forward onto crossed arms, nearly upsetting his coffee as he does so. "I don't understand how you're being so goddamn _calm _about this," he says, voice muffled by the fabric of his shirt.

"Emotions are a hindrance in a case such as this." As ever, Tasha's voice reveals nothing, and Clint clenches his fists and squeezes his eyes shut because he needs to concentrate on something other than the red-hot flame building in his stomach.

"Well," Clint says after he's gotten control of himself again, "we can't all be rocks, Tasha."

"No," Tasha agrees. Her voice is oddly gentle, and without a thought Clint finds himself turning his head so that he can look up at Tasha. Her gaze is downcast and her mouth is slightly parted, as if she is on the verge of saying something else, and Clint unfolds his arms and is sitting up, slowly, before he can help himself.

"Tasha?"

Her gaze flickers over to him, and for a moment she allows him to see past her professional façade; there's a glimmer of understanding in her eyes, a slight, sad upward twist to her lips. "You're scared," she says. "I know. You don't understand how you're supposed to interact with the man who unmade you. You don't know what you're supposed to feel, or if your anger is unjustified; you don't know if you want to see him as a real person, because everything is simpler this way, if he's just a shadow."

Clint swallows hard and clenches his fists, unclenches them, clenches them again. He opens his mouth to respond, shuts it, looks down at the counter. There is a question struggling in his throat, fighting to pry open his jaws and make itself heard, but Clint clamps down on it, swallows it, tries to ignore the twisting of his stomach as the question revolts. He's unsure if he'll even be able to open his mouth without blurting it out, and he doesn't want Natasha to hear that, he doesn't want her to know just how weak he is, but she's _Natasha_, his Tasha, and she knows everything, _everything_ about him, because they are partners and they_ trust _each other, more than anyone else. But still he keeps his jaw glued shut and stares moodily down at the table and clenches and unclenches his fists and tries not to think.

"Spit it out, Clint."

Clint almost flinches, _almost_, but years of training catch up to him before his muscles can react – but he overdoes it, freezes, muscles taut and burning.

Natasha's voice sharpens. "Clint. _Tell me_."

And then Clint's mouth is opening and before he can stop himself the words are rushing out. "Am I a monster? I – I look at him and some part of me thinks, _he deserves this for what he did_, not for destroying Manhattan but for what he did to _me_, and then I just – I'm _horrified_, Tasha, because that's just – what they did to him – he _doesn't _deserve that, and I _know _that, but there's that part of me that's so _satisfied _that he's been punished. But then I realize what I'm thinking and I disgust myself because he's … _two years _… and he's _destroyed_, and that's so much worse than what he … but I can't _help _it, and – "

Tasha's hand is on his shoulder, squeezing gently, and she's murmuring, over and over, "it's okay, Clint. Shh. Calm down."

Gulping for air and trying not to choke on the cascade of words still struggling to get out, Clint quiets and tries to focus on Tasha, Tasha, Tasha, on her hand and her voice and her solid, unwavering presence, doesn't think about – about – no, _Tasha_, TashaTashaTasha, just Tasha, his Tasha.

"You're not a monster, Clint," Tasha says. "You can't help what you feel. He did a horrible, despicable thing to you. He wormed his way into your skull, made you love him and cherish him above all else, and you _hated _him for doing it – but not as much as you hate yourself for letting him." There's something raw and terrible in her voice, and for a moment Clint is certain she's as grateful for him as he is for her. "This doesn't make you a bad person," Tasha finally says after long beats of silence. "You'll see that, eventually."

"Will I?" His voice is hoarse.

Tasha's lips quirk into something resembling a smile, something terrible and sad and haunted. "I did," she says, and then she squeezes his shoulder again, leans forward for a moment – as if she's perhaps thinking of kissing his forehead, or wrapping her arms around him – but then her mouth tightens and her eyes harden and she's pulling away. "Come on," she says, voice brusque and as damnably _empty _as ever. "Let's spar."

Mutely, Clint nods. Drains the last mouthful of his coffee, then stands and follows Tasha upstairs.

* * *

"You know," Tony says, picking at his gums with a toothpick, "something just occurred to me."

"Oh, no." Pepper raises her eyebrows at him, trying for stern and failing; Tony knows her too well to fall for that look. There's a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. "That's never a good conversation starter."

"No, no, no! You'll like this. I think. No, seriously, you will." Tony clears his throat and wriggles into a more upright position, making sure that – even though he's seated and Pepper is standing – his eyes can meet Pepper's.

"Oh, boy," Pepper mutters.

"Shush. Okay. _So_. I was thinking. About, you know, this whole Loki thing. Which is, of course, very traumatic and sad and whatnot. _But_. But! I've been thinking."

"That's the second time you've said that."

"Pepper, you're a horrible audience. You're supposed to be enraptured by my every word."

Pepper laughs and crosses her arms, tilting her head to the side so that she can peer down at him with a warm smile on her lips. "Get to the point."

"Right. The point. The point, Pepper, is that, sad and horrible and confusing as this scenario is, I _think _we have the potential for a whole new facet to Stark Indust – "

"Sir," Jarvis cuts in, "your guest has – "

"Jarvis, what have I said about interrupting me? Shush. Now, Pepper – "

"Tony, I think you should listen to what Jarvis has to say – "

"Pepper, I'm _talking_, c'mon, this is a brilliant – "

"Jarvis, could you please repeat what you just said?" Pepper shoots Tony a sharp-eyed look when he dares open his mouth to protest, her eyebrows arching in a way he knows is meant to say _be quiet or I will make you be quiet_.

"As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted, your guest has exited his room, sir." There is a moment of silence in which Tony doesn't seem to entirely understand what Jarvis is getting at, and then his eyes widen and his mouth falls open.

"I'm sorry, _guest_? As in, Loki?"

"That would be correct, sir."

"Son of a bitch. Where is he now? Call up the video feed."

A surface nearby – a glass coffee table – suddenly lights up with the formation of a video screen. Loki – dressed in rumpled black pajama bottoms and a pale gray-green t-shirt – is slowly making his way down a hallway, one palm pressed to the wall for balance. Tony frowns at the video feed, furrows his eyebrows, and says, "wait, hold on, isn't that _this _floor?"

"It would appear so, sir."

"We're three floors below his room, Jarvis, and you're just telling me this _now_?"

"He's only just left his room, sir."

"If he only just left his room, _he'd be on his floor_, Jarvis, not three floors down – "

"And yet here I am," Loki says, and _fuck it all _Tony _totally _doesn't jump about three feet in the air like he's got springs in his ass.

Pepper, damn unflappable Pepper, looks completely composed as usual; her smile is a little forced and there's a sheen of fear in her eyes, but her voice is completely pleasant when she says, "Mister … Odinson, it's nice to see you out and about."

Loki – leaning heavily against the wall some ten feet away from Tony and Pepper, hair tangled and cheeks pink from exertion – flinches, teeth pulling back over his teeth in a deranged snarl. "I am no son of Odin," he says, and with visible effort he draws himself upright, eyes burning silver.

"I … I'm sorry. Do you have a preference as to what I should call you, or is Loki acceptable?"

"Liesmith, Silvertongue, Skywalker, I care not," Loki says, and he sounds almost _bored_. "But, yes, Loki is acceptable." He smiles, but it's dull and hollow. His eyes flicker over to Tony and then he sketches out a minute half-bow, insincerity practically oozing off his form. "I apologize for startling you, Mister Stark. I require words with you."

"Um," Tony says. "Right. And you couldn't just tell Jarvis to get me because … ?"

"You'll forgive me if I am perhaps a little wary of trusting disembodied voices," Loki says, and he's smirking but there's real apprehension in his eyes, clear enough for even Tony to see. Tony frowns and looks at Loki, really looks at him, tries to figure out if he's okay or just acting, and the answer is clear to read in the minute tremors in his hands and the tension along his shoulders and the way his eyes flick about every which way, as if he's looking for danger or an exit or his captors.

Tony lets out a long breath and tries to force himself to calm down, clears his throat, wriggles his toothpick a bit, and says, "okay, then. Whaddya need? Food, drink, the pleasure of my company?"

"Nothing so inconsequential as that, I assure you," Loki says. There's a faint tremor in his voice, a hint of worry, and then his lips curve into a frown, the pale scars around them twisting and tugging at the skin. Loki swallows, hard, and for a moment all regalia and strength about him disappears, leaving a wasted half-living thing with nervous, wide eyes and twitching fingers.

"So … what is it?"

"My brother," Loki says, and then he jerks as if surprised and shakes his head, corrects himself: "Thor. He's in – there's trouble. He shouldn't have – but he did, and I don't know – I can hardly see him, but I can feel – there's … "

Pepper steps in, eyes wide in concern and voice soft. "There's something wrong with Thor? Is that why he's not back yet?"

"He's – he shouldn't have gone," Loki says, mumbles, more like, and he's staring past Tony with unfocused eyes, and he sways a bit on his feet – Pepper takes a concerned step forward, hands reaching towards them as if she could hold him steady and he flinches back, stumbles backwards until his back is against a wall. He presses himself against it, and then his eyes flash silver. "Thor is in Jötunheimr," he says, voice clearer now, eyes burning. "He's headed to battle, but he knows not what awaits him. He … " and then he breaks off and shakes his head, biting off an impatient growl.

"Loki, _what are you saying_?"

Loki's tarnished silver-green eyes meet Tony's. "I must speak with your director," he says. "The machinations of his war are drawing together. The realms will fall and he will preside over them as Death's right hand, and he will – he'll – you _must _let me speak with your director. Now. It cannot wait, his armies are already in motion – "

"_Whose _armies?" There is something burning at the back of Tony's throat and he's swallowing, over and over again, because his mouth is dry and his heart is beating too fast because Loki's panic, or whatever it is, is contagious, and the picture he's painting isn't pretty.

"Thanos's," Loki says, whispers. He shudders, squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them again they are wide and glistening. "Thanos. The Mad Titan."

"Thanos – he's … wait, that's the guy who … ?"

Loki nods, a sharp jerk of his chin. "He's coming," he says. "And death comes with him."


	6. Chapter Five

**Author's Note: **Sorry for the wait, everybody. Life has been a little hectic lately, and this chapter has been strangely difficult to write. Well - no. Most of it was very easy to write, but there were some sections that literally took me five hours to write three paragraphs. But anyway, here it is, and if any of you spot any typos or other mistakes, or have any criticisms to make, I'd love to hear it!

* * *

INVICTUS

**Chapter Five**

Loki takes a small sip of the beverage Stark had handed him before disappearing and immediately wishes he hadn't. The taste is foul, thick and chalky with a cloying aftertaste that coats his tongue and throat with a sickly sweet substance. Loki manages to swallow before he starts coughing, lungs burning with the effort of hacking up whatever that disgusting thing was Stark just fed him.

The redhead mortal looks at him and her eyebrows crease and he wants to slam her face into the table until she stops _looking _at him like that, like he's some creature unworthy of even the dignity to suffer his misfortunes in private. Loki bites down on his tongue and tightens his grasp on the ceramic mug containing the revolting liquid, averts his gaze so he doesn't have to witness the pity in her eyes.

(He is, for a moment, glad that he's exhausted his floundering supply of magic by transporting himself to this floor; some part of him is aware that he's not entirely in control of himself, that his frustration might manifest itself in a violent surge of energy which certainly would not help his situation.)

Loki focuses on the cream-colored liquid in the mug, notes with some dismay that there is rather a lot of the drink left, and steels himself against the taste. He manages a larger sip this time, controls his gag reflex, but doesn't bother to shield his expression of disgust.

In the reflective surface of the glass table, Loki can see that the woman is frowning now. She's still _looking _at him, still has those pale eyes on him, and it's enough to make him queasy, and the fact that he's unsettled by a _mortal_, a mortal who suffers from all the deficiencies and weaknesses that the vast majority of her race does . . .

(_But mortals are not monsters. They are weak of mind and body, yes, they are pathetic, yes, but they are not barbarians; they are not mindless savages; they are capable of creating beauty, however simple, are capable of making progress, however slight, but they, but _they_, _they_ are nightmares made real, stagnant and stupid, _animals, _grotesque twisted disgusting _things).

"I do have to make sure you drink that, you know."

Loki's breath hitches. He narrows his eyes at the mortal sitting across from him, and is – well, is not _surprised_, per se, but perhaps a little intrigued, because this mortal who is delicate and thin and very much lacking in musculature meets his gaze with level blue eyes

(not Thor-blue, no, too light, too calm to be called Thor-blue but all the same the sight makes his ribs ache)

and smiles, _smiles_, a small quiet thing, all lip no teeth.

"Glaring doesn't work on me, by the way." The mortal's smile broadens, just a touch. "Neither does pouting, whining, crying, scowling, or throwing temper-tantrums.

Loki stares.

She extends a hand and says, "by the way, we haven't been properly introduced. I'm Pepper Potts. I work for Tony Stark."

Loki looks down at her outstretched hand and wills himself to take it – isn't that what mortals do? Shake hands? How strange – but his hands remain firmly clasped around his mug and the knots tying his fingers together are far too complicated for him to undo.

Pepper Potts clears her throat and drops her hand back into her lap, adopting her genial smile again. "Please continue drinking, Loki. It's a liquid meal-replacement."

"If you mortals drink this on a regular basis, I highly doubt the supposed sophistication of your taste buds," Loki says, and he grimaces down at the mug.

Her smile softens. "Most people don't drink Ensure if they're … in the best of health."

Loki's mouth tightens into a thin line, but he forces himself to relax, to let muscles uncoil. He musters up a quirk of his lips which might be a smile and brings the mug again to his mouth. The taste is no less disgusting this time around, but he swallows deeply regardless, because the sooner this is over with the better.

The minutes shuffle past with an aching slowness that makes Loki antsy, jittery, his fingers tapping incessantly at the mug and table. He doesn't know where Stark went, or if he's going to be back soon, or even if Stark even intends to listen to Loki's warning, and the not-knowing, the _waiting_, it's enough to drive anyone to the brink of madness – and he stands so close to the brink, has always walked the edge between sanity and insanity, because a true sorcerer must, and because he has always felt he needs to take it one step further, one step further …

Elsewhere, elsewhere, Thor is blinking the sleep from his eyes and rubbing the tension from his broad shoulders, and there is a sadness, a deep melancholy and confusion and desperation that dims the luster of his gilded smile. Loki's head throbs, sharply, once, twice, and then he forces their connection to dim. Thor's pain fades, but Loki is left with a hollow feeling in his gut and a bitter cold that seeps into his skin.

Loki threads his fingers together around the mug, squeezes them so that the empty space between knuckles disappears somewhat, flesh yearning for flesh. Absentmindedly, he rubs his right thumb over the knuckle of his left hand and remembers, briefly, sunlight and warm hands clasped around his and the laughter of long-forgotten innocence.

Loki's thoughts frost over: sunlight to the cruel shade of winter dusk, warm hands to knives that dig, innocence to the hysteria of the mad. He grits his teeth and remembers nothing.

Dual footsteps make Loki's shoulders tense, knuckles turning white as he clenches his hands more tightly. After a moment, he determines that one set of footsteps belongs to Stark, and that the other set – purposeful, even, more of a march than a casual stroll – must belong to the red-white-and-blue Captain. Sure enough, not a moment later the two men round the corner and step into Loki's vision. Neither appear to be armed – in fact, the both of them look pathetically mortal in their flimsy garb – and Loki breathes a quite sigh of relief when he realizes that their clothing is far too thin to hide any weapons.

The two of them halt several feet away from Loki, Stark adopting a hands-in-pockets impassive stance that tells of an attempt to downplay his nerves. Despite the distance between them, Loki presses his back into the cushions of the couch. Truly, he wishes he were standing, or perhaps that his back were against a wall rather than a rather flimsy Miðgarðian cushion, but he lifts his chin and refuses to acknowledge the nervous sweat prickling along his hairline.

The Captain surveys him for a long moment, and Loki's tongue dries and he swallows reflexively, but all the same there's a voice, poison in his ears, _weakling ergi, you pathetic fool, afraid of a mortal?_ The Captain stares. Loki meets his gaze and refuses to break it.

Finally, he says, "well, you look a lot better than you did when I saw you last, I can say that much."

Loki blinks, the only indication of surprise he allows himself. He doesn't deign to respond, instead raises his eyebrows and wills the Captain to continue. The blonde frowns, crosses his arms over his chest, and gets to the point. "Tony told me something's gone wrong with Thor." It's a question, but it isn't. The subtlety of the Captain's desire to know _more, more _is that of an axe cleaving through the air in pure daylight.

"Something's always gone wrong with Thor," Loki mutters, but he shakes away the memories before they can take root and expounds upon what he said. "Thor has ventured into Jötunheimr in order to find the Allfather. The decision was a rash one, he's blind to what awaits him – he never _thinks_, the idiot, that's why he needs – " (_me me me_, that's why he needs _me_)

"Needs what?"

Loki ignores the Captain's question. "How much has Thor told you of Jötunheimr?" Loki asks, and is disheartened when both Stark and the Captain shrug and look at each other, lips twisting into apologetic frowns.

"I mean, it's not like it ever came up much, like, hey, Thor, tell us about that place with all the ice," Stark says. The Captain shifts on his feet.

"It's a wasteland," Loki says. "Populated by monsters that haunt the dreams of every child of Ásgarðr from the moment they are old enough to understand the stories their parents tell. The Frost Giants are despicable creatures, bloodthirsty savages who must live in separate tribes loosely united by one king so that they do not murder each other where they stand. They are warmongers who take perverse pride in their cruelty, who slaughter the weak in droves and care for nothing but their own selfish advancement." Loki's lip is curling and there is that familiar sharp twist of pain in his heart, a tightness in his ribcage, the oily feeling as if his very words are tainting his skin, as if just by talking about the Frost Giants their filth is worming its way deeper into his being, into his very essence …

"Huh," Stark says. "Think I know a politician or twelve who'd fit right in there."

"Tony, let him talk," Miss Potts says, and unbelievably Stark quiets. She refocuses her gaze on Loki. "Thor's going into battle with them?"

"Not just them," Loki says. "I can _feel _it, there's a … an entanglement in the threads, _his _presence, his rule, stamped all across the face of the realm."

"The 'him' in question being Thanos, I'm guessing?" Stark says, and when Loki nods he sniffs and crosses his arms across his chest and adds, "see, hold on, what I don't really get is – well, there are a couple of things I don't get, so bear with me here. Okay. So, one: who the hell is Thanos? And, following that, two: what was his problem with _you_? And three: um, how, exactly, do you know all this?"

"I'm a sorcerer," Loki says, and if his tone is perhaps a little sharp and a little cold, well, Stark is nosy, and Loki abhors nosy people.

"That … doesn't really explain anything, but okay, whatever, be that way. I'm guessing that was an answer to number three? Cool, one down, two to go. Should I repeat the questions again, or are you good?"

"Tony," Miss Potts says, hisses rather, and Stark grins at her and puckers his lips as if in a kiss, and she groans and rolls her eyes and looks away.

Loki sets his mug down and clasps his hands together in his lap, eyes low. "Thanos is … ancient," he says, quietly. "Even I know not how old he is, but I do know that the last time he rose to power was well before my birth, and the war he waged took the combined might of Ásgarðr and all its allies nigh on a thousand years to end."

There's a pause.

The Captain is pale, but his eyes are hard and he stands rigid with steel in his spine and it is strange, really, how even in his flimsy garb he looks every inch the soldier now. When he speaks, even his voice has changed; stronger, lined with control. "And now he's in Jötunheimr, preparing to wage war?"

Loki nods.

"Against … ?"

"Everyone," Loki says, voice dull. "Everything. The universe. He lives to please Death, would do anything for her praise. He's a fanatic; he believes the more destruction he sows, the more worlds he burns in Death's name, the more love and power she will bestow upon him."

Stark snorts, but it's more of a huff of breath than anything else, shaky and thin. "You're joking. You've got to be kidding me. The universe? He's going to wage a war against the _universe_?"

"He intended to start with Miðgarðr," Loki says, and he waits for them to catch his meaning. It doesn't take long; there's a short stretch of silence pulled taut, vibrating with tension, and then Stark swears, loudly. The Captain opens his mouth as if to ask a question, but Loki silences him with a sharp look and a flare of power which sparks at his fingers. The Captain's mouth shuts. Loki clasps his hands more tightly together, and continues.

"Thanos employed a creature known as the Other, thus gaining himself the power of the Chitauri – a race you are well-acquainted with, at this point. Originally, Thanos meant for the Other to send his armies to Miðgarðr with the simple task of obliterating all life. It was meant to be a declaration of war upon the Nine Realms as well as a sacrifice to Death in order to ensure their success. However, his original plan of using the tesseract as a means of transportation was … flawed. From his end, Thanos could only muster the energy needed to open the paths between the worlds a crack, hardly enough space for one person to squeeze through, let alone an army. There was no one Thanos could delegate the task of retrieving the tesseract to, as it was a rather delicate operation and the Chitauri aren't exactly suited for delicacy.

"My arrival changed things somewhat. I had … fallen from the Bifröst into the nothingness that spans between the realms, and as luck would have it I landed on the footstep of the Chitauri. They were … not kind, even less so after they discovered who I was. Thanos demanded my aid, and he made it quite clear that answering in the negative would cause me no shortage of agony. In order to spare myself eternal torture or something of the like, I made an agreement of sorts with him. As a child, I discovered splits in the threads of the universe, paths that led between the realms, and as such I could easily cross from the realm of the Chitauri into Miðgarðr via the tesseract. I asked only that Thanos would allow me to keep Miðgarðr for myself.

"I care not if you believe me, but I had no real intention of ruling this realm. What I truly wanted, I admit, was to be free of Thanos – and the only way I could ensure my safety after doing so was to get myself imprisoned in Ásgarðr. The destruction of Miðgarðr on my hands would mean my death. Its attempted subjugation, on the other hand, would call for a few centuries of imprisonment, which was precisely what I hoped for. So I allowed Heimdall to see me, I traveled via the tesseract to Miðgarðr, and I staged a rather convincing invasion while ensuring that I would fail and be brought back by Thor to face Ásgarðian justice. If I may say so, the plan worked perfectly, and I was brought back to Ásgarðr in chains as I had intended.

"Thanos had promised retribution if I were to fail my mission, but I had assumed the strength of Ásgarðr would be enough to keep me safe. It wasn't. Some two weeks after my arrival on Ásgarðr, Thanos stepped through one of the paths between worlds I had inadvertently made him aware of and … well. I am sure you can imagine what happened next."

Loki smiles, a dull, empty thing which makes his lips twitch and his cheeks ache, and he looks up at Stark and the Captain, his gaze finally leaving the safety of his clasped hands. Stark is uncharacteristically silent, his cheeks drawn and lips thin, and Loki is surprised to see that Miss Potts has taken hold of his wrist, gently, gently, slim fingers massaging the skin there in circles. The Captain is shaking his head slowly, his gaze downcast.

"You know," he says, his voice low, "after the invasion, Thor would always talk about how it was so unlike you, that you'd rely on brute force to win you the throne. We all just assumed … "

"Thor is many things," Loki says, "but, despite what I often say, he is not a complete idiot." His smile fades. _You lack conviction_, the dying agent had said. How strange, that he could see what even Thor could catch only glimpses of … _Thor. _Unease stirs in Loki's belly, tightens his lips. Where is Thor now? Is he unharmed? Is he _safe_?

Tentatively, Loki draws on the connection that he and Thor have shared since their boyhood. He intends to only take a quick glance, to ensure that Thor is still in relative safety, but the first brush of Thor's conscience against his is so warm, so bright, that he hardly sees how he can let it go again. Wary of alerting Thor to his presence, Loki stays on the very outskirts of his mind and simply basks in Thor's warmth. He breathes a sigh of relief when he realizes that not only is Thor currently safe, but his wounds have all been healed.

The urge to plunge into Thor's mind completely is similar to the desire to burrow deeper under the blankets on a chilly morning, the want to stay here, where it's warm and safe and pleasant, rather than venture out into the cold and the dark. But Loki shrinks back from the connection, takes a deep breath, and then slams the door betwixt their minds shut. The resulting emptiness, the feeling of _missing _something, makes Loki's chest tighten.

Stark and the Captain are looking at him expectantly. Loki hadn't realized they'd spoken. His throat is sore, his head is aching, his chest _hurts_. He's tired. Why is he so _tired_?

"You okay, reindeer games? You're not looking so good," Stark says.

Loki nods and returns his gaze to his interlocked fingers and murmurs, "I've not spoken so much in years. It's more exhausting than I remember it being."

"Take it easy," the Captain says. "Don't worry too much about it. I'll let Fury know what you've told us so far, and the next time you're feeling up to it you can tell us more. Alright?"

Loki nods again. He's shivering, he realizes, but he's not cold. He misses Thor. He doesn't want to, oh, _gods_, he doesn't want to, but he _does_, and Thor isn't here and his skin is cold and his chest is tight and his heart_ aches_, and he doesn't _want_ to miss Thor –

A familiar heat burns at the back of Loki's eyes, and he takes in a shuddering breath and tries to shove Thor, not-brother Thor, not-brother Thor who never tried to save him, out of his mind. His hands are trembling again.

Miss Potts pushes the mug containing the Ensure closer to him, the movement accompanied by a faint rasp of ceramic over glass. "Here," she says. "Finish this, okay? And then you can rest."

Loki wraps his fingers around the mug and raises it to his lips, takes a brief swallow. _Disgusting_, he thinks, but he manages to finish most of the Ensure before his stomach twists in complaint, swollen and distended far past comfort. Miss Potts frowns at the few mouthfuls of Ensure left, but she makes no complaint, and when Loki rises to go she lets him.

The Captain accompanies Loki back to his rooms, trailing slightly behind him in case Loki should fall or require assistance. Loki snaps at him several times to leave him be, that he is more than capable of making his way to his room without aid. Whenever he stumbles or falters and the Captain moves as if to help him, Loki bares his teeth in a wordless snarl and carries on. He will _not _accept their pity, as if he is some pathetic _ergi _who requires a steady hand to make it through! He is Loki, and he is nothing if not independent, nothing if not strong; whom has he ever relied on if not himself? To be Loki is to be _alone_, and through all his long years he has been just that – and Loki will not lower himself to requiring the personal aid of _mortals_.

When Loki finally makes it to the room, the Captain seems to want to say something – is hesitating, shifting his weight, eyes bright and cautious, but Loki shuts the door behind him before he can make out more than, "Loki, look – "

He doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't want to _listen_, doesn't want their help. _Go away_, he thinks, nudges outward with faint tendrils of energy, and after a few moments the Captain turns on his heel and walks away.

Safely in his room, Loki tilts his head back against the door and closes his eyes and clamps his lips shut so he doesn't give breath to the budding whimper fluttering in his throat. Gods, he wants – he wants – _nothing. No one. _Loki needs nothing, no one, he _doesn't_. It is better that Thor isn't here, better that Thor is far, far away, in danger's grasp, on Thanos's doorstep –

Loki heaves a shuddering breath and blinks back the heat in his eyes. Childish. He's being childish, pathetic. Weak. Thor will be fine – Thor is always fine, is he not? Yes. Thor will be fine and Loki will be fine, and when Thor returns Loki will have remembered how to shut himself away, and there will be no more of this foolishness, no more of this pathetic _want _of his brother's comfort.

When Loki turns off the light and maneuvers himself beneath the covers, he presses his face into the pillow and pretends he doesn't want warm hands holding his.

* * *

"You think he was telling the truth?"

"Do you?"

Steve surveys Tony for a moment, taking in the creases around his eyes and the drawn, haggard look to his face, and nods.

Tony groans and sinks into the couch, pressing the heel of his palm against his eyes. Steve sighs and crosses his arms over his chest, shifting his weight, and says, "you know, all this time, I thought he was just some sort of … deranged lunatic who was obsessed with the prospect of winning himself a throne. I mean, that's what it was like with Red Skull and the tesseract the first time around – I thought he was insane, completely out of his mind. But that's … really not the case, not anymore."

"Jesus Christ," Tony says, voice hollow. "Imagine. Being found by _that_? And you heard him, Steve, he – they were 'not kind', he said. Christ. _Fuck_. He was just trying to get away from them."

Steve settles on the couch next to Tony, laying a comforting hand between his shoulder blades. Pepper's making the phone call to Coulson in the next room over, and soon he and Tony will have to sit across from the man Loki nearly killed and tell him that war is coming. And Fury will clasp his hands behind his back and fix them both with that one-eyed stare and he'll say, "_are you sure he's telling the truth, gentlemen?_"

And Steve will say, "_sir, there's nothing I'm more positive of_," because somehow Steve just _knows _it's true, as if he's known it all along but he hadn't realized it until just now.

The two of them sit in silence for several minutes, Tony hunched over with his elbows on his knees and chin cradled in his hands, Steve rubbing absentminded circles into his back and staring across the room. His mind is whirling, shifted off its axis, and all he can think about is a younger, more vulnerable Loki falling through nothingness to land on the doorstep of monsters, the desperation he must have felt, the sheer determination it must have taken him to plan out his pseudo-invasion accordingly with the threat of terrible punishment hanging over his head.

Thor's told Steve enough so that he has some idea of the time frame between events, has some inkling of just how long Loki's been trying to escape Thanos's reach. The incident with the Destroyer and the subsequent destruction of the Bifröst was a year or so prior to Loki's – no, Thanos's invasion. Steve doesn't know how long Loki fell, or when it was that Thanos found him, but at the very least he must have spent several months in Thanos's care, being 'persuaded' to help Thanos win his war.

Steve thinks back to the invasion, thinks back to the way Loki had looked, hunched and small, in the back of the quinjet. At the time, he'd not given much thought to the pale skin and hollow cheeks or the bruises beneath the eyes, marking them off as signs of his insanity and nothing more. But now … he'd looked ill, tired, an air of neglect about him as if he hadn't the energy to take care of himself. Testaments to the treatment he'd been subjected to at Thanos's hands?

But there had been power in that wiry frame, sheer strength and an undeniable talent for battle. Steve remembers the way his lithe body had moved, the ease with which he'd flung Steve through the air; and he remembers, hardly over a week ago, the sheer energy Loki had unleashed which reduced sixty behemoths to ash.

Steve shivers. For if that was an example of Loki's power after three years of ill care, at least two of those years in which he was starved and tortured to the brink of death, how powerful _is _he at the peak of his health? When he is well-nourished and stable in body and mind, when he is at his full capacity for destruction – just how powerful will he _be_?

* * *

Thor is laughing, loud and boisterous as ever. Loki laughs with him because he's had a tad too much to drink and because today is a _good _day, today is a day belonging to brothers, and because when Thor laughs _with _him life is as it should be.

The story that produced their hysteria is a little clouded, obscured by mead and slurred tongues, but it has _something _to do with a journey the two underwent perhaps a dozen years past, in which Thor had tested his strength against a decrepit old woman and _lost_, and they had sworn to each other, _never ever_, they will never share the tale with another – but to each other they recount the story hundreds of times, so exaggerating it in bouts of drunken creativity that the memory itself is warped by fiction.

Thor is stumbling through words, incoherent and unintelligible – Loki is fairly certain he's put away at least four or five barrels of mead; Loki managed a few horns before he found himself simply unable to continue, unused to partaking in such festivities – and Loki finds himself laughing again without knowing why, and then he stumbles and nearly falls. But Thor is quick to react when Loki is in danger, even when drunk, and he hoists Loki upright again by clamping his hands beneath his arms. Loki half-collapses against him before he can get his footing and that sets Thor off again with the laughter, and the two of them stumble and veer sideways into those flowerbeds Idunn is so protective of before Thor can finally clamp his arm around Loki's shoulders and gain them some semblance of sober grace.

The world spins, and Loki groans and presses his face against Thor's broad shoulder and rues the day he was born. Thor huffs out a small laugh and cradles Loki's skull with one paw and scratches at his scalp, gently, gently, murmuring something, and Loki almost feels ready to cry because who else could ever be in his position? Who else would Thor trust with his most humiliating stories, who else would Thor seek out when he sought a respite from his duties as firstborn –

(_and no Loki is not jealous he really isn't but they look at Thor and they see the makings of a great king, someone Shining and Golden and Safe, and they look at Loki and they see a stranger wearing the skin of the Æsir_)

– but it's not true, is it? Surely he and the Warriors Three have stories they recount to each other and no one else, surely there are facets of Thor which he does not see fit to share with his strange and unworthy little brother, surely there are others whom Thor prefers the company of, surely one day he will wake and Thor will be crowned in gold and he will have no time for Loki, no use for him, and Loki will flounder in the shadows Thor casts and who will he have, who will he _be_, for what is Loki without Thor?

But this is not the time for deep thoughts; this is the time for laughter and mead and Thor's powerful arm slung around his shoulders, their unsteady feet bringing them in meandering paths through the palace gardens. Thor's grip is tight on an empty drinking horn, is tighter around Loki's upper arm, and Loki feels as though his heart is in his throat, as if he's too small a vessel for the emotions bursting in his veins, and in this moment he's glad, so very, very glad that Thor is his brother and that he's here and that they're _together _and Thor's not with his gaggle of morons, that Odin's judgmental gray eye is not cast upon them, that right now, at this very moment, they're not Thor-the-Warrior and Loki-the-Sorcerer or Thor-the-Golden and Loki-the-Tarnished, but rather Thor-and-Loki (_but never Loki-and-Thor_).

They approach the cliffs that overlook the upper tier of the city, and the constellations are bright and pulsating and the Bifröst in the distance is gleaming, starlight glinting off millions of broken pieces crowned with frost, and Thor is looking out and he's not laughing anymore. His mouth is tight in a frown and his brows are drawn over his eyes, and he looks at Loki and says nothing. He has taken his arm off from around Loki's shoulders, has Mjölnir in one hand, is wearing his armor, is regal and splendid with his gold hair and red cloak rippling in the howling wind –

And Loki takes a step back, because this isn't Thor, it's not, Thor would never _look _at him like that, with darkness lurking in the corners of his eyes, every line of his face creased in revulsion. But Thor matches his step, looms over Loki – since when has he been so _tall_, since when has he ever worn such a look upon his face? Spider webs of frost crawl up Mjölnir, spread across his chest and arms, and his cloak is laden with snow and his cheeks are hollow and his lips are blue, and when he speaks he does so as if even his throat is iced over: "_Do you see what you have done_?"

The ground beneath Loki's feet crumbles and he is falling, head over heel, and his scream is the sound of shrieking wind and splintering ice. Shards of light pierce his vision as if they were knives, and he takes no notice of the how or why but the next he knows he is dangling from the Bifröst, scrabbling for a hold, but his strength is leaving him, his flesh is rotting and peeling away and there is something blue beneath that bubbles as if boiling, and Thor is looking down at him or perhaps it is Odin? And he's pleading, _help me, Brother, please – Thor, Brother, I can't – _and Thor reaches down and grasps his throat and hisses in the guttural language of the Chitauri, "you have no brother." And his hand tightens and he laughs, cruel and cold, and some unknown presence below Loki answers with a keening howl. Thor laughs and the creature below laughs and then Thor bellows, "_catch_," and Loki is flung out into darkness, into the awaiting arms of – of –

(_don't think it don't say it he can hear you, always, he can see you, always, he's watching he's waiting he's _coming_)_

– he's falling and there's laughter, wild and haunting, the screaming mirth of the damned, and above him Thor is standing cold and distant, growing smaller, diminishing to nothing but a faint glimmer of gold as Loki hurtles into blackness. _Brother_, he thinks, or maybe he shouts it; _Brother, please! _But there is nothing but emptiness now, emptiness and the rapid stuttering of his heart, and he's falling or he's held in suspension with gravity tearing at his hair and clothes, and in the darkness hands are reaching for him, fingernails digging into flesh and he's thrashing and calling out for Thor because Thor _promised_, he _must _come for him … !

He chokes on a cry and gurgles as something presses on his windpipe, tight and heavy, something frozen that sears his skin. Hands everywhere, fingers along his jaw his lips reaching into his mouth, forcing their way down his throat, and ice is crawling down his cheeks and coating his lips –

And Thor's hands clamp on his shoulders and hold him there, and he struggles, he does, but Thor's always been stronger than he is and he's _squeezing_, bones splintering and joints popping out of place, and there's that _voice_, the sound of boulders rumbling down the mountainside and of bone cracking under pressure, and its words are too terrible and too ancient for even Loki to comprehend.

Loki tries to cry out, can't, foam and blood bubbling out between lips that refuse to open. Thor is heavy, so heavy on him, six-fingered hands and scaled skin digging into his, teeth sharp and unforgiving. Something large and rough between his legs, and he's pleading _don't don't don't _but the Chitauri jeer and scream their laughter and look down at him with Thor-blue eyes gleaming with delight, and when he tries to raise a hand to defend himself they tear into him, split him open, and he can't move, is bound so tightly by iron chains that he can hardly breathe.

Ravens caw somewhere above him and then they're on him, sharp talons digging into skin, and then _rap, rap, rap _of their beaks against his skull, gobbling at his flesh like starving creatures, his eyes bursting and running over cheeks, and again – _rap, rap, rap _– and bile sour in his throat and he's choking and the Chitauri suffocating him with their heat, Thor above him and _argr, argr _and this is Thor, Thor his not-brother and he can't but he _is _and there's – there's _Thanos_, and he's chuckling and he puts his hand on Thor's shoulder – proudly – and with Odin's voice he says, "well done, my son," and Loki wakes choking on a scream.

He doesn't have time to make it to the bathroom, hardly even has time to lurch forward onto his hands and knees and vomit over the side of the bed. Acid burns his throat and when he reaches up to wipe off his mouth his hands are shaking badly. He closes his eyes and tries to breathe deeply but the darkness panics him, and when he opens his eyes again he hardly has the courage to reach over and turn on the light beside the bed, so certain that if he extends his arm _they'll _be there and they'll grab at him and drag him back to their master.

He fumbles with the switch twice before managing to flick it on. Light pools across his bed, illuminating his surroundings – nothing. No one. Still he trembles.

_Rap, rap, rap_ comes a noise and he is just lucid enough to realize that it's a knock on the door, not the pecking of ravens, but that doesn't prevent him from flinching and curling back into himself.

"Loki?" Stark, _damn _him, why is it always _him_? Has he not learned his lesson? Has he not realized that Loki needs no one, that Loki _wants _no one (_that Loki is wanted by no one_), that if Loki were strong enough he would not think twice about tearing his eyes from their sockets and hurling his broken, thrashing body off the highest peak of the highest building, screaming his laughter to the wind?

Loki huddles back against his pillows and his fury is a live thing building in his throat, intermingling with the sick desperation and the thought, _no no no I'm not broken I'm not I'm not I'm not_, and his entire body is tight and clammy and overheated. The light seems to be too much; its glare hurts his eyes, makes him see spots of black in his vision, makes his throat clench over and over again. He fists his hands, relaxes them, fists them again, digs his fingernails into the skin of his thighs.

"I _can _see the light from under the door, you know."

Loki swallows a groan and feels his stomach clench and roil, has to fight the reflex to gag. But his throat is opening again, his stomach pressing up against his ribs, and the blanket is too heavy and the weight of its fabric is the weight of the Chitauri against his back his stomach between his legs, all over him. He clamps his mouth shut and tries to breathe deeply. _Go away_, he thinks, hardly recognizes it as a thought; _go away go away go away_. He will not allow Stark to see him like this, cannot. His eyes are hot and feel bruised, and there's a sour taste on his lips, and he's shaking still and he is _fine_, he is fine he is _fine_, but he needs time to ready himself for presentation, time he doesn't _have_.

"Jesus. Christ. The silent treatment? Really? If you don't answer me in like, two seconds, I'm busting the door open." Loki clenches his fists and breathes through his nose and imagines, for an instant, that he's ripping out Stark's throat, that he's tearing his broken body limb from limb – but then Stark's body is his own and they're coming and they're snapping his arms like twigs and their hands are around his throat and squeezing squeezing squeezing, and there's the sour taste of bile in his mouth again.

It's just his luck, isn't it, that Stark enters the room just as Loki lurches forward and dry-heaves, bile coating his tongue and teeth. "Oh, gross," Stark says, distantly. Loki's stomach rolls, presses upward, and he gags again, and he's exposed like this, it would be so easy for them to _break _him, and the thought is enough to make his stomach heave once again. This time he brings up a mouthful of bile and the taste makes him retch until finally the last of the bile has dribbled from his lips onto the floor.

Loki works up some saliva, spits it out, tangles his hands in the mess of sheets and blankets, twists, hard, fingernails splitting the fabric. He's shaking.

"Well," Stark says, a few moments later, "good job. You kept breakfast down for, uh, approximately six hours. That's progress. I think. Is that progress?"

"I wouldn't say so, sir," Jarvis says.

"Oh. Well then." Stark raises an eyebrow. Loki bares his teeth at Stark, knows he looks a little deranged with his hair tangled and bile still on his lips, very nearly snarls. Stark clears his throat. "Um. So."

"What do you want?" Loki hisses. His fingernails rip through the fabric and dig into the flesh of his palm, breaking skin and drawing blood.

"Jeez, rude, much? Bruce sent me to check on you, 'cause you, uh, you seemed to be a little … distressed … " Stark trails off, and Loki knows it's because his face has contorted into the harsh sharp lines of fury, lips split back over teeth, eyes wide and white and half-crazed.

"Get out," Loki says, voice low and rasping and tearing at his throat. Stark hesitates, opens his mouth to respond. "Get. _Out_."

Stark backs up a step, hands held up in the universal sign for peace. "Whoa, wait, hold on a sec, don't get mad at _me _– !"

"_Out_!" Loki's hand closes around the lamp, metal yielding beneath the strength of his fingers, and he flings it at Stark, hard as he can, screaming, "_out, out, out, out, out!_"

Stark yelps and ducks just before the lamp shatters above his head on the doorframe. Loki is shaking, anger thick and heavy in his blood in his head, and this time he grabs the bedside table and hurls it at Stark. His vision is swimming and his arms feel numb and thus his aim is off, the wood exploding on contact with the wall a few feet to Stark's left. Stark is babbling, trying to get Loki to listen, but Loki doesn't care. He struggles out of bed, half-falling and just barely missing the mess of bile, stumbles to one knee and drags himself up again through sheer determination.

"Okay, Loki, calm down – "

"_Shut up_!" Loki shrieks, and he doesn't know why he's reacting like this, doesn't know why he can't control himself, and he's shaking and the room is too hot but his skin feels icy-cold too cold why is it cold

(_abandoned alone in the cold and the dark left to die_)

and gold magic sparks along his fingers and its normal reassuring hum of power is the squeal of metal against bone, and Loki hisses out a breath and hurls the energy at the door. Stark scrambles backwards, flings himself sideways, and Loki realizes just now he's still chanting, "out, out, out, out, _out_" – and the door slams shut of its own accord, cracks and splinters under the pressure of Loki's anger.

He's shaking and breathing hard, fists clenching and unclenching and clenching again, and _where is Thor _and is he safe, is he hurt? And he rips the connection open and pain slams so suddenly into him that his knees buckle and the air is torn from his lungs, and he's gasping for breath, can hardly think above the pain – like somebody has a knife under his skin and inch by inch is peeling it off – and Thor is in trouble, and he's hurt or dying and there's _fear_, and Thor is _never _afraid.

Loki struggles to close the connection, but Thor's fear and anguish and _pain _keep the door wide open, emotion thundering from one mind to the next. Loki's breath hitches and he strains harder, pushing against the flow of Thor's emotion with all that he has – and it's no use, because Thor is frightened and desperate and there's too much of what he's feeling to fit inside one mind, and the overflow spills into Loki, leaves him woozy and struggling to breathe.

Loki isn't sure what compels him to do what he does next, but it is to him as natural a reaction as breathing. He slips around the maelstrom, can still feel the roar of emotion all around him, and carefully, carefully, reaches out and brushes against Thor's conscience. His mind is hard and unyielding, shielded by the intensity of his emotion, but Loki presses himself closer to it, weaves his fingers through to his brother's center, taps into the warmth that is Thor's very essence.

The cascade of emotion quiets to a dull roar in the background, and then – and then – tentative fingers reach out and wrap around Loki's. Loki burrows deeper, pushes past Thor's hesitant touch into his arms, folds himself around his brother – his not-brother – around Thor with a desperation that sickens him. _Come back to me_, he thinks, and to his shame there is heat building in his eyes and wetness slipping down his cheeks. _I need you. _

Thor's response is a brightening of his conscious, a surge of warmth accompanied by the fierce promise of safety, of love, of affection. Loki clings to Thor and Thor clings to Loki and neither can quite bring himself to let go.

* * *

**Author's Note: **I forgot to mention! Last chapter I nerded out and included a fairly obscure Shakespeare reference, so if you catch that I will be very happy. Also, in this chapter: who knows what journey Thor and Loki are giggling about before the dream turns all nasty? (Mythology buffs, I'm looking at you.)


	7. Chapter Six

**Author's Note: **You all have the permission to slap me if we ever meet in person for taking so long with this chapter. Apparently I have mono. And apparently applying to colleges takes time. And apparently AP's are a pain in the ass. Who knew? I sincerely apologize for the lengthy wait between the last chapter and this one; and I also sincerely apologize for any and all typos in this chapter, as I kind of rushed through editing to update tonight because I'm going to NYCC all day tomorrow (!) and I wanted to get this up before I started making excuses again.

Also, I'd like to thank all my anonymous reviewers and reviewers who do not have private messaging enabled. If you'd like a personalized thank-you and very long-winded response to your review and any and all questions (except perhaps the very spoiler-y ones), enable PM! I'd love to talk to you all. I have a ridiculous amount of affection for all of you and would like to show it the best way I can.

Apologizing also for the potential shitty-ness of this chapter (it was harder to write than I expected - sigh). And apologizing prematurely for another long wait, if it comes to that. (Which I sincerely hope it doesn't).

Just a **friendly reminder **to y'all that this story has **no Loki romance whatsoever**; and that the only relationships we shall see in this fic are the canonical Tony/Pepper and Clint/Natasha (not sure entirely if it's a bromance or a romance, because in the comics they switch so fast it gives me whiplash).

And one final note before getting to the chapter (sorry! sorry! sorry!): the canon of this particular verse is inspired heavily by mythology, with a little dash of the comics, a whole lot of the movie!canon, and interpretations of Loki's character by Sturluson, H. R. Ellis Davidson, and the various other professors who devote their life to studying mythological characters. Happy reading, and I'd love to receive constructive criticism, questions, etc - I love getting into conversations with all of you.

* * *

INVICTUS

**Chapter Six**

When it comes to shit-your-pants terrifying situations, Tony Stark is no rookie. He's been tossed out of windows; has felt the slow decay of life with a chest gaping empty; has hurdled through space toward the earth, the world gray and black and blurred at the edges; has even been on the receiving end of Pepper's unbridled fury and survived to tell the tale (mostly) unscathed. So, when it comes to situations that lesser beings would shrink back from, Tony downs the rest of his scotch, rolls his shoulders, and strolls into the line of fire with a swagger in his step and a smirk on his face.

At the moment, Tony is not smirking. He is not swaggering. He can't quite remember how to stand, or breathe, or blink. The shattered remnants of a nigh-unbreakable metal lamp litter his floor, dust his hair with glimmering fragments. He is sitting just out of range of a littered assortment of jagged-edged wood chips, the flyaway chunks borne from the introduction of Loki's rage to the door. There is, he is sure, a perfectly logical reason for what's just happened and why he's sprawled on his ass, but the finer gears of his brain seem to be in a bit of a jumble.

"Well," he says out loud when his mind has finally gotten the blaze of confusion under control. Very slowly, he gets to his feet – warily, every twitch of his limbs the jerky stop-start movement of those who have to remind themselves every moment how to walk.

Tony Stark is not a coward. He does not think of himself as being particularly brave, seeing as most of the time he acts before his terror can catch up to him, but he would not ever cast that label, that damning epithet that announces to all the world that you are a _failure_, onto himself; at least, not aloud. In certain moments (some lasting entire weeks or months or years) he will think bitterly to himself, mind clouded by the bitter choke of scotch or vodka or whatever he can get his hands on, that Steve, that his father, that _everyone except him _knows that he's just a little boy dicking around in a toy box pretending he's a hero.

(Because, in truth, Tony Stark fears above all not measuring up, of casting a shadow larger than his physical form; and to know that he is human, the most vulnerable of the team – he has no years of training, no special serum, no rage monster lurking under his skin, only a metal encasement he's imbued with the closest thing to life science can offer – to know that the team could survive just as well without him as with him …)

But Stark's mind is wandering. Meandering in circles, refusing to believe that the creature behind the door has lulled them all into a false sense of security, his body tense and awaiting the climax of Loki's rage, that hollow-eyed sharp-nailed explosion of feral energy and savage, unbroken power – and he has lost coherent thought again, and if Loki were to attack Tony would be caught completely off-guard … and yet Loki is _not _attacking.

Beyond the shattered, crumpled doorframe, there is neither sound nor strange flickering displays of light which Stark would have immediately assumed were the precursors to Loki's mayhem. There is an odd sort of calm settled over Stark now; not so much being at ease, for his heart is still hammering in his ears and his muscles are still tense in his shoulders and upper back, but a certain distance, a separation between the logical workings of his mind and the emotional and visceral reaction to the recent events.

From somewhere else – around the corner, perhaps; Tony's relatively certain that there's an elevator over there, although right now his mind isn't working at its usual impressive quality so he can't be sure – there is a ding, and the heavy fall of boot on ground, and almost before Tony realizes what's going on Steve is rounding the corner, flat-out sprinting, so desperate in his attempt to reach Tony before Loki wreaks havoc that he has not yet taken off the ludicrous apron that Tony got him for his birthday the year before.

Tony thinks that this would be the perfect time to make some sort of snide remark, perhaps some quip regarding Steve's proper place (read: the kitchen, making Tony sandwiches), but the moment is lost when Steve skids to a halt before him, fists clenched and eyes wide as he surveys the damage surrounding the two of them.

Tony grins, somewhat sheepishly, when Steve's stare returns to meet his. "Oops?" he says.

Steve gives him a dirty look. "What the hell happened?" he demands. "Alarms started going off, Jarvis pulled a fit and said Loki was 'misbehaving' – what's in your hair?"

Tony runs a hand through his hair and hisses in pain when a rather sharp piece of metal worms its way under its skin, drawing a pin's head worth of blood and a rather unmanly squeal from him. "Lamp shards?"

"_Lamp shards_?"

"Loki threw a tantrum." And it's much easier to think about if he relates the god to a five-year-old not getting his way, because when he remembers fire-in-his-blood terror and the certainty that he was not only going to be beheaded by a flying lamp, but then be torn apart through utilization of tooth and nail – well, there is a certain relief that comes with the knowledge that his pants are still dry. And he's not been thrown out of a window; that's always a plus.

"A _tantrum_?" Steve is saying. Tony tunes back in to raise his eyebrow at him.

"Yeah. Are you going to repeat everything that I say? If I wanted a parrot, I'd've bought them all already."

"Christ, Tony, is everything a joke to you?"

"Only the funny things. And thousand-year-old gods throwing temper tantrums? Definitely a funny thing." Tony grins and ignores the echo of the twist in his belly and the paralysis that had overtaken him thereafter. "And," he adds, almost as an afterthought, "I am, like, ninety-nine percent sure that we've had this conversation several dozen times before."

Steve takes a deep breath. In a movement of sheer grace belaying the power of his frame, he raises his hands to his face and drags down, slowly, the muscles in his forearms clenching and twitching in complementary action, and releases the breath he took. "Okay," he says when he has appeared to have calmed down a bit. "Okay. What did _you _do?"

"Hey, don't blame this on me, okay? _I _didn't do anything. _I _was being a good Samaritan – "

"_What did you do_?"

" – because you know, that's me, always looking out for the interest of – "

"Tony, shut up and tell me what happened."

After a pause, Tony says, "You are a stick up my ass, do you know that?"

Steve's voice lowers to a whisper, each word ground up and spat out of his mouth like so many rounds from an automatic machine gun. "Tony, there is an ex-war criminal in there who is psychologically and physically traumatized, and I want to know what the _hell _it is that you did that made him 'throw a temper tantrum' when he can hardly even_ get out of bed_."

"Look, buddy, it's not that big of a deal – okay? I'm handling it." Steve raises his eyebrows and looks pointedly around them; Tony takes in the shattered metal and shards of wood, and then protests, "Well, _I _think I did okay!"

"Just a thought, Tony, but I think you might need to work on your definition of 'okay'," Steve says. He grimaces in the direction of the buckled doorframe, then flickers his eyes over to Tony once again. And then he sighs and his entire body deflates, as if by magic; suddenly he looks small and tired, normally ramrod-straight posture slumping into weariness. Inexplicably, Tony feels horribly, disgustingly guilty.

"Sorry," he says, whispers, almost, and he swallows hard. "I thought I could help. Guess it didn't really work out how I thought, though, huh."

"No." But Steve offers him a smile, a hint of tooth at the corner of his mouth, and then he continues, "Do you want me to go in and talk to him?"

"Give me five minutes," Tony says after a pause. "After that, you can play therapist as much as you want. I just think, you know, I might be able to get through to him. Maybe. I need a scotch."

"You're _not _giving him alcohol."

"Not for him, for _me_. But, you know what, good idea. I'll get him a scotch, too. I never did get him that drink." And with that Tony is striding away from Steve, striding away from the shards of wood and the fragments of metal and the thing hiding in a god's skin between the closed door.

* * *

Loki is hardly aware of the receding footsteps or of the voice that calls after Stark, exasperated and stern and perhaps the tiniest bit amused. Thor is in his head, in his blood, warm hands and gentle touches and the faintest flicker of lightning-blue eyes, and it's Thor who has his attention, Thor whom he wishes – privately – would never leave.

The sharp pain of their initial contact, the spillover of Thor's agony and frustration into Loki's mind, has dulled to a distant throb that pulses in Loki's ears as if in tempo with Thor's heartbeat. This connection that they share does not allow for communication, not in the strictest sense of the word. Emotions flow freely from Thor to Loki, from Loki to Thor, and there is enough tacit understanding between the two of them despite all that has happened for there to be a shared sense of relief, of safety, of familial love and affection.

It is as though Loki exists in two worlds; here is the corporeal realm, where the pressure of the floor against his knees and hips is enough to make him wince, where even blinking takes energy he's uncertain he can spare. Safe within the confines of his skull is the other world, the better world, one where warmth spills across his skin and existing doesn't hurt. Loki wishes this would never end.

But the energy and concentration it takes to uphold the strengthened connection is slipping from him, receding into the hazy-edged shadows that line his thoughts. The feeling of Thor and warmth and comfort is fading. Thor struggles against it, his panic and frustration spiking and digging footholds into Loki's mind; but Thor's prowess has ever been in the physical, and the little ground he gains in upholding the connection soon crumbles way to a gaping chasm that widens by the second. Pain throbs in Loki's chest and his temples, an ache that flares and ebbs with the beating of his heart, but he hasn't the energy even to make one last halfhearted grab at the bond he shares with his brother. Thor slips from him into darkness, and Loki is left utterly, damnably alone.

Without Thor's presence, this world is too large, too quiet, too sharp. Loki closes his eyes and can't find it in himself to open them again.

His knees ache, and the sharp ridge of bone in his ankles digs painfully into the ground. The press of hipbones against skin will leave bruises, he's sure. He's seated awkwardly, slumped on his knees with his feet folded beneath himself, and it isn't comfortable in the slightest, and although Loki tells himself – the thought meandering at a sluggish pace through the twists and turns of his mind – to move, to shift his weight, to get onto the bed, to do _anything_, his body seems unable to comply with his request.

Minutes or hours or days or years later, there is a knock on the door. There is not enough energy left in Loki to feel panicked, or startled, or angry. He hasn't even the energy to devote to forming a coherent thought. He remains where he is and doesn't raise his head or open his eyes. The ache in his chest settles into his bones, manifests itself as a tightness in his throat and heat in his eyes.

There is another knock on the door, this time accompanied by the voice of annoyance personified. Stark (again). Asking to come in (again). Loki understands what he says, but can't discern individual words. The voice is muted and hazy, warped by the fog seeping into every crevasse of Loki's brain. He should get up. He should respond to Stark. Ask him if he ever _listens_, or if he had just assumed Loki was being insincere when he'd screamed at him to get out. He should move.

His hands are cold.

The door creaks and shifts, there is the muted fall of foot on floor, and there's Stark's voice again, closer but no more coherent. If Loki opens his eyes the world will be in grays and reds and purples, saturated to the bursting point, colors bleeding from within their own boundaries to push out, out, suffusing the world with the feral glint of his grin – and oh _come now Loki give us a smile_ – _Not now, Thor, I'm reading _– _But you're _always _reading – Yes, Brother, because, unlike you, I do not plan on letting my mind rot – _

The warmth against his shoulder must be Stark's hand. Ice drips and crawls through his veins, stiffening his muscles slowly, so slowly, and by the time Stark's warmth recedes Loki's body has realized that it's being touched, it's being touched and it doesn't _want _to be touched, and tension pulls his muscles tight and tangled within themselves.

Talking again (does he ever stop?). This time, Loki recognizes snippets of words, his name; "C'mon, Loki – … back … alright? We … care of –"

Another voice, also familiar: "… be okay, you'll – … is he –"

… _alright? Of course he's alright, he's my _brother_. None can harm a son of Odin. _

The laughter bubbles in his throat like madness. Odinson Laufeyson Nooneson. _Oh, no_, he thinks, and the thought is the heat of scorched-grass-summer; _Oh, none can harm a son of Odin, Thor, isn't that right? _And the ache in his chest is a live thing that pulses and writhes and _screams_, oh how it _screams_, pain and rage and so much too much it can't stop –

_screaming, something's screaming, some pathetic twisted excuse of a creature, and distantly, oh so distantly, he wonders if it's him, wonders if he's_

dreaming. He has the strangest notion that time has frozen around him and that opening his eyes will break the spell – and this has all been a delusion brought about by some concoction of Thanos's – and he will wake and feel the poison drip drip dripping out of his system – and this has all been a _lie _– and if he opens his eyes the Chitauri will carve truth into his skin again –

But he doesn't hurt, he tells himself (tentatively, tacitly). Come now, Loki. Think. He remembers the shock of his magic slamming back into him, remembers how he had stumbled and fallen to one knee with his blood set ablaze in his veins; remembers the Chitauri soldier who'd grabbed at him, and he had panicked and loosed the chaos within him without restraint; and he remembers flinging himself out into space and bending it to his will; and he remembers the pain of his landing; and these memories cannot have been falsified, cannot be the product of one of Thanos's strange potions.

Open your eyes, Loki.

_Oh-ho! A more buxom maid I've never seen! Loki, feast your eyes on the shape of her curves – You are a pig, Thor. A drunk pig. Shut your mouth before you drool all over the table._

Open your eyes, Loki.

_Your brother, he's, well … odd, wouldn't you say? I've never seen him take a woman to bed before, do you think – is he – you know – …? It's just that, well, there are rumors – _

Open your _fucking eyes, Loki, _god_damnit _– and that doesn't sound like him – he is not one to sully his tongue unnecessarily with this strange mortal vernacular – and, oh, warmth again on his shoulder, and his muscles ripple and clench in a shudder that starts at the base of his spine and travels to the crown of his skull. The hold on his shoulder intensifies, tightens, is almost painful for the sheer heat rolling off it.

_Wake up, Loki_, he thinks, or perhaps someone says it; but there is a strange detachment between thought and action, but he is at least aware of a feeling deep in the pit of his stomach that twists and clenches with staggering finality – and he remembers the smile of the decrepit old woman as she bound his and Thor's hands with hair plucked from their heads, the strong voice she chanted the runes in – and he remembers the warning on her lips, the bidding to tether himself to his body lest he is lost – and he remembers the grin on Thor's boy-round face as Loki's mind brushed against his, and the bragging that there is none in the land who has a better brother than he.

He does not panic, because he's not quite aware enough to panic; but comprehension digs into his skull with talon-sharp nails and strips the skin from his scalp, and he is numb but stinging, all over, skin stretched too tight, too tight, over bones and words and the poison festering inside him.

Loki focuses on the heat on his shoulder, concentrates on the feel of it pressed against the thin fabric of his shirt. Four fingers, shorter and thicker than his, curling slightly against his skin; thumb with a jagged edge to the nail that is almost painful against his collarbone. He feels his body breathing, pays it no attention; instead drags himself closer to the sensation of nail against skin, the sharp pinch as the fingers flex and dig.

Pain blossoms to life in his knees and the next breath is akin to knives scraping along the sensitive tissue of his throat; and sound slams into him so suddenly he wishes he could turn off his hearing, if only so that he doesn't have to listen to the faux concern thick in the words of Stark and the soldier.

"Get your hand off me," he rasps, and the voices falter and then go silent. The warmth on his shoulder withdraws. He doesn't open his eyes.

His hands are cold, _freezing_ against his upper arms when he hugs them to himself. He takes in another breath – in, out, in again – and then says, calmly, calmly, "What part of 'get out' is it that's so difficult to get through your thick skull, Stark?"

"The part that has to do with me getting out, apparently," Stark says. "And, uh, Loki? Next time you decide to go all zen on us, do you mind giving us a warning or something?"

The phrase is strange, but Loki's mind is functioning well enough at this time to understand what Stark is implying. "I'll do my best," Loki says, and his voice is dry, dry, dry. He realizes his eyes are still closed. He should open them, he really should – but …

Is it so wrong that he _likes _the darkness behind his eyelids? Is it so wrong that he doesn't want to see their false worry with their false sympathetic smiles and false kind words? Oh, he has no doubt they _pity _him – the weakling _ergi _who found himself at the mercy of a monster, so _shattered _his reconstruction would take eons – but they pity him as they would pity a kicked dog, lost without its master.

His fingers tighten and twitch. He's _cold_.

There is a rustling sound, the soft crinkling of trousers folding, and then the soldier's speaks up: "Can you open your eyes for us, Loki?"

"I can," Loki says. He doesn't open his eyes.

Silence for a beat.

"_Will _you open your eyes for us?"

"No," Loki says, and he knows that Stark must be scowling, that Rogers must be sighing and rubbing his forehead – a tic that he's noticed in the scant hour or so he's been in the soldier's company. In his youth, he'd had a similar habit; he would knead the bridge of his nose, easing out the tension that gathered there, and Thor would scowl at him and say, _Brother, you're going to bore a hole into your brain one day by doing that_, and Loki would throw a sheaf of crumpled-up parchment at Thor, and Thor would laugh and drag him outside to watch him train.

Loki's throat constricts until he can hardly breathe. He doesn't realize his head is bowed until his chin brushes against the ridge of his collarbone.

Rogers clears his throat, shifts on his knees. "Loki, we're going to need to bring you to the medical center. Since you can't keep your food down –" (and Loki can feel the heat flush across his neck and cheeks and ears, can feel the shame burning through the lining of his stomach) " – we're going to have to put you on an IV, okay? Just until your body recovers a little bit more. Just a few days."

Loki opens his eyes and stares down at the jut of the bones in his wrists. The blue of his veins makes him nauseous. His voice sticks in his throat.

"It's not a big deal," Stark says after a few moments, when it's clear Loki isn't going to answer. "I mean, honestly, you get all the joys of nourishment without ever actually having to eat. It's great for long projects. At first Pepper – remember Pepper? Don't let her smile fool you, she's fucking terrifying when she wants to be – would harangue me about eating, like, eight times a day when I was locked up in the workshop, but then she finally brought down an IV, and, _bam_! Instant nourishment, _and _there's no need to worry about getting oil stains on the blueprints. Perfect solution."

Before Loki knows what's happening, his jaw unhinges itself and someone is speaking in his voice: "Thor was like that. When we were young."

There is silence, just a few beats of it – enough to make the back of Loki's neck prickle – and then Stark says, "Yeah?" in that tone of voice that indicates he wants Loki to continue.

But Loki shakes his head, presses his fingers deeper into his arm – watches the pale skin fade to white – and then he murmurs, "I'm – I don't think I can …." He swallows and oh, there's the shame again – and he knows better than this, knows better than to show weakness – but it hurts, his stomach and his skin and his eyes, and he won't – can't – move.

"Hey," Rogers soothes, voice low and mellow, "We'll take care of it, okay?"

For a moment, anger rumbles deep in Loki's chest; and then he aims a poison-green glare at Rogers, mouth twisting, and he says, "I _refuse _to be carried around like an invalid."

"Good, 'cause I sure as hell wasn't going to carry you. You probably have rabies." Stark is smirking, a hint of tooth at the corner of his mouth. "No, see, what we're going to _do _is put you on a chair with wheels and roll your royal highness down to the medical center. You'll be the baddest motherfucker that ever did live."

Loki's eloquence curdles somewhere at the back of his throat. "I … what?"

Stark smacks himself in the forehead. "Son of a bitch, I forgot! I brought you a drink." He reaches behind him, feels around, draws out a small glass half-filled with amber liquid. At Loki's appraising look, he explains, "Scotch. I don't know what year, but, according to Pepper, it was a 'damn good year'."

Loki has nothing to say other than "What", but he loathes repetition so he clamps his mouth shut and twists his food into an expression of blank confusion and waits for Stark to explain.

Stark raises an eyebrow to match Loki's. "Scotch? C'mon, you guys don't have scotch?"

"Is that not some sort of mortal alcohol?" Loki finally ventures after having finally mulled over the vaguely-familiar word to conclusion.

"Very good, A-plus. Here's your reward." Stark holds the drink out for him.

Loki purses his lips until they form a pale pink slash across his face. "I'd rather not," he says. "I'd be loath to sully my tongue with your pitiful excuse for mead."

Stark recoils as if slapped. "Can you believe this guy?" he says to Rogers, and Rogers simply sighs and kneads at his forehead and shakes his forehead slowly.

"I'll get the wheelchair," Rogers mutters. He stands, wincing slightly as his joints pop, and Loki is – to his immense dissatisfaction – left alone with Stark, who's apparently decided that if Loki won't drink the scotch, he might as well.

"You know," Stark says, after he's drained half the glass in one gulp, "Your presence in my tower has turned me into a raging alcoholic. Again. According to Pepper."

"I'm simply overwhelmed with guilt."

"I'm sure. By the way, did you know that Thor didn't leave your bedside for like, three days after you fell outta the sky? You've got one devoted big bro. You are one lucky bastard."

Loki recoils at the epithet, and he's hardly aware that he's snarling until Stark holds up his hands in surrender and says, "Hey, look, I'm just _saying _– he cares a lot for you, and you kinda treat him like shit from what I've seen – what with the whole 'I'm not your brother' thing –" (he adopts a strange, whiny falsetto that is most definitely the worst interpretation of Loki's voice he has ever heard) "—and the angsting and, you know, stabbing him, and stuff, not cool.

"_Although_," Stark says, and he holds up a finger to shush Loki because his blood is turning to fire in his veins and he's certain poison will begin to drip from his tongue any moment now, "I gotta say, the whole hand-holding thing was _adorable_."

Loki's mouth gapes open.

"You don't remember?"

Mutely, Loki shakes his head.

"Pity. It was cute enough to make grown men cry. Apparently having your hand held by your big bro is a comfort thing. Kinda like, you know, the uh – safety blanket thing? Comfort blankets? Whatever they call them. The guy from Peanuts. With the blanket. Whatsisface."

"I hope you realize that nothing you are saying makes sense," Loki says, just to have something to do with his lax jaw and tongue, and there's a flush across his cheeks, he's certain of it, can feel the warmth prickling at the underside of his skin – and Stark _grins _at him, the bastard, grins and winks and knocks back the rest of his scotch.

"So," Stark says after he swallows and clears his throat, "You want to explain why you woke up, spewed guts everywhere, then went bat-shit insane?"

"I hardly see how it matters."

"Seeing as you nearly took my head off with a lamp, I'd say it matters. At least to me, anyway, and this is my house you're staying in, so fess up. Nightmare?"

Loki digs his fingertips into his arms, relishing in the sting of nail against flesh. "Such an accurate observation, Stark," he says, all forced calm, "Why, you could give Agent Romanoff a run for her money, as you Miðgarðians say."

"You're kidding me, right? She's like a robot. As I recall, she beat you at your own game, in fact – and as awe-inspiring and god-like as I am, I am not, in fact, a master manipulator."

"Is that you think happened? She 'beat me at my own game'?" Stark's smile falters. Loki feels absurdly like laughing, but he has the strangest feeling that if he does so he'll let loose the sobs held hidden deep in his chest, so he adopts a thin smile and evens his tone and continues, "Begging your pardon, Stark, but I have had over a thousand years to perfect my 'game', as you so naïvely refer to it. Agent Romanoff has had mere decades."

Stark settles back on his haunches, face strangely still and thoughtful. "You really played us at every step, didn't you," he says after a few moments, and it's not a question but Loki nods anyway. "You," Stark says, "are incredible. Angsty as fuck and dramatic as a teenage drama queen, but incredible nonetheless."

Loki resists the urge to roll his eyes, but just barely. "Ah. So the great and mighty Anthony Stark finally recognizes his betters."

"I said you were incredible, not 'better than the great and mighty Anthony Stark' – which, by the way, is a title I enjoy immensely; do you mind if I adopt that as my new superhero name? Except for the Anthony part. The Great and Mighty Tony. The Almighty Tony. You know, if I were a girl, I could call myself the Iron Maiden. Maybe I'll make Pepper a suit … newest member of the Avengers …" and he trails off, eyes glazed and distant.

Loki doesn't understand this: the wild sashay of Stark's speech, the words that meander as if without purpose. It is as if he doesn't _think _– or, more likely, it is as though he voices each individual thought and chases the strands down twisted, winding corridors, engaging in so many tangents that he loses sight of where he began.

Loki's lip begins to curl before he can stop it, but Stark is tapping one finger against his chin thoughtfully and doesn't appear to notice. Only a fool speaks so freely without an ulterior motive.

And yet, for all his idiocy and mortal hindrance, Stark has an annoying tendency to hit upon truths without recognizing them for what they are – and Loki will have to be more careful in the future interacting with Stark, if only to preserve himself the dignity of being called any adjective along the lines of 'cute' or 'adorable'. He doesn't recall clasping hands with Thor – perhaps Stark was fabricating a lie? But, no, his body had recognized the words as a truth; and that means that Stark has witnessed his weakness – that perhaps _all _of the mortals have witnessed his weakness – and that is unacceptable.

More frustrating still is that Stark's singular observation rings more true than Loki likes; he remembers (briefly, only briefly) the warmth of Thor's mind against his, and swallows past the knot in his throat, squeezing his cold fingers against the flesh of his arms. Wanting the comfort of a brother – of a _not-_brother – is childish and a testament to his weakness, and wouldn't the Ásgarðians be so _very _pleased to know that he is the pathetic _argr _they always thought he was – a grown god who whimpers and reaches out for his not-brother because he's too _weak _to survive on his own, without a hand to hold – and he will _not _be that man, he refuses to be; and if he must shelter himself within his own skin to avoid Thor's warmth, so be it. He's had centuries of isolation and cold skin; he's sure he can survive a while longer. He must. He will.

Rogers, thankfully enough, returns with the so-called wheelchair within the span of a few more minutes, and Loki is saved from the prospect of further interaction with Stark when the man excuses himself and races off to his laboratory – apparently so enamored of this new idea of his, this conception of the 'Iron Maiden' that he absolutely must scribble down some schematics, right now, else he will surely shrivel up and die.

The wheelchair is a strange contraption, and Loki eyes it warily from his position on the floor. Rogers clears his throat and says, "Can you get up yourself, or do you need help?"

Loki bares his teeth in a snarl and snaps, "I'm _fine_," but several attempts at standing prove that he is, in fact, incapable of getting to his feet without aid. The shame that flushes in his cheeks and clenches at his stomach is close to unbearable; and when Loki manages to get one foot beneath himself only to lose his balance come down hard on his knees again, heat pricks at his eyes with an intensity that surprises him. He tries to take in deep, even breaths to calm himself, to force the moisture gathering in his eyes to recede, but the breaths meant to calm only rattle in his chest and choke up his throat, and by the time Rogers finally steps in and silently helps him into the chair with an ease that makes Loki furious at himself, there are tears tracking their way down the slope of his cheeks.

Pathetic. He cannot even stand unaided.

He doesn't protest when Rogers wheels down the hall; doesn't protest when again Rogers hooks his arms beneath Loki's and lifts him – easily, too easily – into a soft bed in a white room; doesn't protest when the beast-turned-man smiles nervously at him and slips a needle into his vein. When he is handed a cup of water sweetened with sugar and told to drink, he drinks and manages not to spill; and when Banner asks him if he'd like something to help him sleep, he accepts with a nod and descends into a soft, muted blackness mere moments after yet another needle pricks the skin of his upper arm. His last coherent thought is that he hopes he does not dream.

* * *

Thor grunts with pain as the mammoth hand of a Jötunn clasps onto his dislocated shoulder, skin and bone shrieking under the pressure of its cruel fingers. He is hauled off the ground without explanation, and before he can get his feet underneath himself he is being dragged down a long and icy corridor. The pain of the Jötunn's hand digging into the distended space between joint and socket of his shoulder makes his vision go black and gray, makes silence roar in his ears. His left knee throbs with every jostle and scrape along the ground, the swollen, hot flesh around his kneecap pulsing in time with his heartbeat. There is not a single place on his body that does not hurt – but nothing hurts quite so much as the knot twisted deep in his chest.

He isn't sure where the Jötunn is taking him, and he cannot speak around the ice-and-metal gag burning against his lips and tongue to ask. The Warriors Three and Sif had been dragged away from him, severe blows to the head rendering the four of them unable to struggle. Sif alone had managed to tear herself away from the Jötunn that had captured her, but she was too disoriented by injury and blood loss to fight. Her honor would never have allowed her to flee, Thor knows that, and he is almost dizzy with relief that she had not the wits about her to fight; if she had caused injury to any of the Jötnar, he is sure she would have been injured severely in recompense, perhaps even killed. Thor had watched as his companions disappeared around a corner, and then he'd been thrown to his knees before a cluster of the strange light-skinned Jötnar while they conferred with one another in their native tongue.

If it had not been for the first tentative brush of Loki's mind against his, Thor is sure he would have been unable to think beyond his rage and terror. But Loki's need for comfort, the opening of his heart to Thor, had quelled the fury shielding his thoughts; and for a few scarce minutes Thor was able to pretend he was holding his little brother close, the pulse of his essence in steady accordance with Loki's. But their reunion had been short-lived, Loki yet too frail to sustain the open connection, and before Thor was ready Loki had slipped from him

(as he always does)

and Thor was left alone in the cold with the monsters and with his fear and anger, concern for his brother a live thing that fluttered at the back of his throat.

Now, without the cool edge of Loki's consciousness to temper his own white-hot rage, Thor can feel coherent thought once again slipping from him, fading to the most basic of instincts: to fight, to draw blood, to wreak havoc upon the bodies of those who _dared _harm his friends. But he struggles not to lose himself, knowing that in this state – Mjölnir somewhere far away half-buried in the snow, Thor's shoulder refusing to heal until it is snapped back into place, exhaustion and injury weighing so heavily upon him he cannot stand – that he would have no chance in a fight against the strange behemoths so similar yet so different than the Jötnar of Jötunheimr and Muspellheimr.

So Thor breathes in deep through his nose, clamping his teeth down on the gag in his mouth, and tries to _think_. For all his brother's insults, Thor is far from stupid; he has benefitted from the schooling necessary for a Prince, and he has always been blessed with a keen sense of warrior's instinct and emotional intuition that Loki has never quite grasped. He may not put his mind to complicated endeavors often, but Thor knows well how to use his cunning when the situation calls for it. After all, was it not he, not Loki, who once tricked a dwarf into staying above ground until the first rays of sun turned him to stone through use of words alone?

No, Thor is not stupid. And so he sets the cogs in his brain whirring along, breaking apart the situation as he knows Loki would, laying out the pieces to survey as he would a map.

What he knows is that he and the others had been ambushed by a group consisting not just of Frost Giants, but also of the strange Jötnar belonging to the race that broke and defiled his brother. Thor had been so enraged upon the sight of them that he had, stupidly, arrogantly, leapt into battle without second thought, resurfacing from his blood lust only to discover that swarms upon swarms of Jötnar had descended upon them. And with his mind distracted, if only for a moment, a Jötunn caught Thor across the temple with a heavy blow, and darkness embraced him.

What he knows is that, when he woke a handful of minutes later, the Warriors Three and Sif had been deposited on the ground with him, unconscious or incoherent; and a handful of minutes after that, they had been dragged away from him.

What he knows is that, right now, Thor wishes, more than anything, that he had stayed in Miðgarðr until Loki woke, if only so that he could have offered his brother comfort in a realm of strangers and hostile forces. He had been thinking only of the pressing urge to find Odin and demand answers, thinking – foolishly, arrogantly, selfishly – that Odin's confession would somehow alleviate the guilt stooping his shoulders, give Thor some way to redeem himself in Loki's eyes (because oh, he just _knows _that Loki will blame him for not knowing he was gone, for not tearing his way through the Nine Realms until Loki was safe again at his side).

And now Loki is in a strange realm, surrounded by strange mortals, hurt and scared and alone, and _he _reached out to _Thor_ – latched onto him with a desperation and need he hasn't displayed since they were children and Loki woke crying out from nightmares of biting cold and darkness that swallowed him whole.

The Jötunn twists its fingers, and Thor tries – he really does – but he can't quite bite off the howl of pain that rips at his throat. Thor struggles to rise to his feet using only one leg, his swollen knee rendering him handicapped, and the Jötunn hisses, "Stop your struggling, _Ás_," and the tight grip tightens further.

Thor chokes on his next breath, body twisting and jerking involuntarily as the pain in his shoulder explodes, and the Jötunn mutters something in its native language beyond Thor's comprehension even with the aid of the All-Tongue. When the Jötunn snarls again and pulls Thor savagely off the ground, Thor's vision goes black; and when he comes to, he is slung over the mammoth shoulder of the white-skinned Jötunn, held in place by one trunk-like arm.

This position, at least, does not aggravate Thor's shoulder, and although his knee continues to throb it is not quite the piercing pain it was before. And with the pain diminished greatly, Thor can focus, can absorb his surroundings for future reference. Although – and Thor realizes this with a sinking heart – the ice that makes up the walls of this dead place is _moving_, corridors sealing themselves shut while others are gouged into existence.

Thor grits his teeth against the gag and shakes his head vigorously, clearing himself of the anger already simmering away at the base of his neck. Well – it is no matter. No matter. When he has snapped his shoulder back into position and found Sif and the Warriors Three again – when he has found his _father _– he will conjure Mjölnir and make his own exit.

The Jötunn slows, then comes to a halt; and then it says, in a deep, rumbling voice, "Ah, Billingr. Has your king sent you?"

"Aye." The other Jötunn must be a Frost Giant, then; the king referred to must be Býleistr. "I am to create the cell for the Ásgarðian scum."

Thor's hands tighten into fists – and then pain lances up his arm, pooling in his dislocated shoulder, and the hoarse, strangled sound he makes is muffled by the gag. The Frost Giant scoffs and says, "You see how fragile these creatures are? I do not understand why we cannot simply kill them all and take our rightful place as lords of the Nine."

"That is not the plan," the Jötunn holding Thor says. "And if you are so stupid as to go against the master's wishes, then you deserve the worst of death."

Billingr makes a low, acquiescent noise in the back of his throat. "This way," he grunts, and the two of them walk in silence for a short time before halting again. Ice creeps and crawls along the corridors, and in a handful of seconds the way is shut.

With a huff of breath, the Jötunn sets Thor down upon the ice in a small alcove just off from the corridor; and before he can seize his chance to run, ice sprouts along his wrists and ankles, binding him tightly to the floor. The cold is staggering. Billingr inspects his work, nudging at the bonds, and then he grunts in satisfaction and steps back. "They'll hold," he says. "He'll freeze to death soon, if we're lucky."

"He's not to freeze," the strange Jötunn says, voice sharp. "Bring furs."

"Those weren't my orders."

"My orders come from your king's superior. The little princeling will have furs, and if harm befalls him you shall answer as to why – and you will not be pleased, I'm sure, with the outcome." The white Jötunn grins horribly, and tethered as he is – flat on his back, helpless, shoulder still screaming in agony – Thor feels panic flare up between his ribs.

Billingr is still for a long, long moment – and then he bows low and mutters, "As it pleases my lord." He takes a respectful step backwards, head hanging low – but Thor can feel the resentment pouring off him like steam, and he is struck with the beginnings of an idea; but then the white Jötunn leans in close, yellow teeth mere inches from Thor's face, rancid breath clogging Thor's nostrils. It laughs quietly – as quietly as a giant can laugh – and it says:

"I'd wipe that look off your face if I were you, Odinson. My master wishes to have words with you. He will be so pleased to meet his little pet's brother – so very pleased."


	8. Chapter Seven

**Author's Note: **I am truly sorry for the wait! This chapter should have been up on Monday or Tuesday, but then Hurricane Sandy rolled into town and kind of shot that plan to bits. I live right outside NYC, and we lost power, heat, internet - everything. According to the town, we might not have power until 11 November. I'm updating from the library, which thankfully has free, accessible WiFi. I'd like to apologize in advance for not answering reviews quickly; I'll come to the library as often as I can (in part so I can respond, in part so that I don't freeze to death in my own house - I've been wearing a minimum of five layers for the last week, and I'm really coming to a more intimate understanding of Steve Rogers in that regard), but I might not get to your review right away.

Also, a** response to the anonymous reviewer 'Oops' **because I felt the need to respond to this particular statement: "I again have to admire you for taking such a bold step into the now-much-looked-down-upon world of no slash pairings. I thought writers like you were extinct, but you have restored my faith in man and women relationships. Thank you." I actually find it quite funny that I've restored your faith in heterosexual romance, because about 95% of my original characters are homosexual, asexual or demisexual, pansexual, genderqueer, trans*, etc. I'd also like to take this time to say that **my Loki is 100% not interested in women**. :)

Okay. Onward to the chapter, sorry for the long A/N, constructive criticism will be met with open arms, please enjoy!

* * *

INVICTUS

**Chapter Seven**

As soon as he is left alone in his ice-wrought cell, Thor pulls at his bindings, thrashes his limbs, ignoring the blinding pain in his shoulder and knee. He strains with all his might at his manacles, muscles bulging and screaming in protest, and yet even his great strength is useless against the ice that binds his wrists and ankles. When Thor manages to turn his head just enough to glance down at the ice around his left wrist, even he has knowledge enough of runes to note that a spell must have been carved into the very essence of the ice, giving it strength beyond his.

Thor grits his teeth and forces himself to be still. The heat that his body gives off in this frozen place could be enough to melt the manacles just so, to allow him to slide his wrists free; if that is the case, all Thor must do is wait and be patient. Although ice can be spelled to be stronger than any metal, Thor doubts – hopes to doubt – that the properties of ice can be changed so drastically that heat fails to melt it.

So Thor breathes in deep and slows the rapid hammering of his heart with difficulty, and begs his body to be calm. His struggling has made his shoulder a veritable pool of fire, pain sparking along his nerves when he so much as twitches. His knee is starting to go numb; the ice is so cold, so all-encompassing, its bite so bitter and sharp, that it's almost more than Thor can bear. His vambraces protect his wrists from the frozen, dead touch of the spell-altered ice, just as his thick boots protect his ankles, but nonetheless Thor feels as though his very blood will turn to frost if he is left here for too long. He would not put it past the HrimÞurs, barbaric creatures they are, to go against the wishes of the strange white Jötunn and allow him to succumb to the cold.

But Thor refuses to die anything but a warrior's death, Mjölnir singing her war song in his hand and a triumphant grin on his face, drenched in the blood of his fallen enemies; and much as he loves his niece, for no reason other than that she is of his blood, he has no wish to descend to Hela's realm this day. He will not allow his body to fail him.

Very few Æsir possess the capability for magic, and fewer still have the power or the drive to pursue anything more than a rudimentary understanding of it. Thor does not number among those few; his command over the natural forces of storm and thunder is no magic, but instead his birthright. Thor is thunder and lightning embodied, and its power flows within him just as blood rushes through his veins, but without Mjölnir he has no control over it.

Much as Thor appreciates his brother's tricks, Thor has never felt any jealousy for Loki's skill; seiðr is not much appreciated among the Æsir, and for a man to embrace his magic, to become as well-versed as Loki is in it – well, it is an abomination, unthinkable. Loki had been forbidden from studying it – seiðr is for women and decrepit old men who have long surpassed their use on the battlefield, not for princes – but he had proven stubborn and unyielding; and finally, after a series of ineffective punishments over the years, Odin allowed Loki the right to study magic as he so wished, although he refused Loki's requests for a tutor; Loki would learn seiðr-magic on his own, or not at all. So, no, Thor has never felt any jealousy for the magic that Loki wields as easily as he breathes; but, in this moment, with only his will-power and tattered armor to keep him warm, Thor wishes – briefly – that he had been blessed with at least a meager portion of magic, at least so much as to conjure a flame.

Loki has always had an affinity for fire, Thor remembers, which is strange considering his heritage; but, then, perhaps it is not so much an affinity for fire as it is an affinity for magic in all its forms. Except for, perhaps, Seeing; but as Thor understands it, Seeing is different from magic, and even the most powerful of seiðmaðrs do not often have the gift of Sight. Frigga possesses the Sight, and, to a lesser extent, the warrior Baldr does, as well. But Loki, for all his sheer talent and hard work, has never been able to grasp the art of peering into the future. He didn't care for the art much, Thor remembers Loki telling him, but it was frustrating beyond words that he could not grasp it.

Thor had asked him – perhaps naïvely – what the point of mastering the art of Sight was if Loki were so uninterested in it, and Loki had simply shot him a condescending look, and with a flick of his fingers shut the door to his chambers in Thor's face and thereafter refused to open them.

Two weeks later Loki had emerged from his chambers thinner by several pounds, dark smudges under his eyes. He went immediately to the kitchens, and that is where Thor found him, eating strips of seared white fish in that strange, neat way of his. He'd glimpsed something, he told Thor; but when Thor asked him what it was he had seen, Loki looked away and thinned his lips and didn't reply.

Thor wonders if Loki can stomach solid food yet, but the mere thought of his brother as he is now is enough to make his stomach twist, so Thor shuts that line of thought down and returns his attention to the ice around his wrist. They must have melted somewhat – Thor, like all Æsir, has a relatively high core body temperature, higher than that of the humans. But there doesn't seem to be any less resistance, and without the cold on his bare skin he is unable to discern whether or not the ice has begun to melt. Thor very pointedly ignores the fact that there is a layer of metal between flesh and ice; he will cling to this meager hope as long as it can sustain him.

"Fool," Loki would have said. "Pathetic," Loki would have said.

The silence is stifling. The cold burns.

Thor wonders why Loki hasn't contacted him again. He's too weak, he reasons, or perhaps he simply does not want to meld his mind with Thor's. Neither thought is reassuring. Ever since the connection was made, up until the moment Loki let go of Gungnir and allowed himself to fall into the nothingness of the void, Loki was a constant presence at the back of his mind, as if – no matter where he was or what he was doing – if he turned around, Loki would be right there behind him with mischief in his eyes.

They had been children still, young and round-faced, and rarely did Thor venture anywhere without Loki at his side. Every morning, they broke their fast with the court, and in the afternoons they had an hour of time to spend with their mother and father, and besides that there were lessons in history and etiquette and the art of ruling, and beyond that they were Free. Of course, they had nannies, but even as a child without any magical training to speak of Loki was able to produce some flicker of distraction with his magic; and then the two of them would be off to raid the kitchens or explore the most ancient parts of the palace or wander about Iðunn's forbidden gardens.

It had been a warmer day than most, Thor remembers, when the rumor had first met their ears. On the lips of every servant, the chefs, the guards: There is a witch, they said, and she sings the songs of the dead and her sight surpasses even Heimdall's, and their voices were hushed and strained and almost-but-not-quite scared. Loki had looked at Thor, and Thor had looked at Loki, and in his brother's eyes he had seen something deep and shifting, a longing that far surpassed need, and he had declared that this was to be their new adventure.

It should have been difficult, but it wasn't. Stealing a horse was out of the question – neither boy was yet large enough to clamber atop one without aid – and Thor refused to suffer the indignity of riding to a witch atop the back of a pony. So Loki had pursed his lips quietly and his eyes had gleamed silver in the look Thor was just beginning to associate with mischief-making, and not long after that they procured a small carriage used by the servants and found a pair of goats to drive them. Quite fondly, Thor called them Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder; Loki frowned and complained that _he _wanted to name one, but Thor was firstborn, Thor was to be King one day, and so Thor got what Thor wanted.

Of the journey itself, Thor remembers not much more than shadows and quiet and Loki pressed against his side, yet too young to be ashamed of his fear. Days and nights had merged in the darkness at the heart of Ásgarðr's greatest forest, and time stretched itself long and thin out in the path their carriage – and later, when the way grew too tangled, their feet – took them. For what felt like days, they wandered and asked the wind where the witch might be found, and Thor does not think that for a single moment he let go of Loki.

And then, on the fifth day, or perhaps the sixth, without warning the ground fell out before their feet, and the world tipped and turned on its head, and their sight went black and gray and hazy. When they woke they were curled together in a small wooden bed, covered with coarse blankets, and all around them was a singing, low and strong and mysterious, and Loki had looked at Thor and Thor had looked at Loki and their breath had frozen in their lungs.

She had seen them wandering, lost and alone, fingers clutching tight at each other, and she had watched and wondered and then finally Saw. All this she told Thor and Loki over a simple dinner of a thick, savory stew and hearty bread, and after that she had plucked from each of their heads a single strand of hair. She began to sing again, haunting and beautiful and achingly sad, and Thor and Loki had watched with their hearts stammering in their chests as she bound their wrists, as their hair glowed briefly white and then sank into their flesh.

She kissed them both atop the head, sent them to bed; and in the morning Thor and Loki found themselves back in their shared bedchambers, with no time at all having passed between the advent of their adventure and its conclusion.

(Some years later, when Thor was not yet a man but no longer a boy, rumors met his ear of a pair of wild goats, each grown to a massive size, wandering the land; and Loki had looked at Thor and Thor had looked at Loki, and in a week's time Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder were his again; but they had turned feral in their time away, and from their mouths burst flame hot enough to melt the skin off bones, and only Thor and Loki could touch them without courting death.)

_Strange_, Thor thinks. He has not thought of that journey in years, decades – centuries even. He cannot recall a time when the memory had been quite so bright, so clear, unfurling with vivid detail in the blackness behind his eyelids.

They had never told another, he and Loki, because why would they? The adventures they shared in their youth were theirs and theirs alone, and although the Lady Sif and the Warriors Three had asked, begged, even, for stories of the two of them in their youth, Thor and Loki had ever only spun them half-truths and lies. This is the only manner of lying in which Thor has ever excelled; sometimes, he thinks that he and Loki had more fun spinning the faux adventures than they did on the voyages themselves.

Thor shakes his head abruptly, shaking the thoughts from his head, watching them scatter about him like so many leaves from a tree in the midst of fall. He cannot – he must stop thinking of Loki. He should be focusing on methods of escape, should be plotting; he cannot let the sweet call of years long gone affect him so.

_Escape_, Thor thinks, as if that will somehow make everything clear. Loki always did find his attempts at plotting pitiful. If Loki were here, Thor thinks, the two of them would already be free, already have found where the Lady Sif and the Warriors Three are being kept; would already have freed them and moved on to find their father, because together, as Thor-and-Loki, they are unbeatable, unstoppable, and nothing – not even a ruin populated by barbarians such as the HrimÞurs and their strange white-skinned brethren – can stop them.

Thor can see it clearly in his mind's eye; Loki would have been chained in some other far-off place of the ruins, and he would have freed himself through his illusions and trickery; and he would melt into the shadows and then reform himself beside Thor, destroying his bindings with but a thought; and then the two of them would crash forth from the cell, subtlety gone, because Thor is raging for a fight; he will break down their defenses, slaughter the monsters, while Loki locates their friends – and then – and then –

Thor squeezes his hands into fists, the muscles in his forearms rippling in response – ignores the effort it takes to form the fist, ignores the numbness prickling in his palms and wrists and fingertips. No. _No_. He must think; the ice is not melting, perhaps – perhaps he did not strain hard enough, there is nothing that can withstand his strength –

(except, perhaps, for the old giantess who had cobwebs for hair and tombstones for teeth – he blames Loki for that, and Loki blames _him_, and perhaps they will never stop blaming each other, but that is harmless, isn't it – isn't it?)

_Oh_, Thor thinks, hazy and cold – and it is cold, isn't it, so very cold – colder than he can stand, and isn't it strange? he thinks, because he's freezing, shivering in his furs, and Loki is wearing only a thin cloak and he's fine, pink-faced from the wind but fine, and he thinks this is the first time he's ever been jealous of his brother –

Thor unfolds his fingers, folds them again, and can barely feel the pressure of his fist.

_Brother_, he thinks – and he imagines for a moment that the ice around his wrist is Loki's hand, that Loki is looking at him with eyes darkened by – by what, by sorrow? by Sight? – and Thor thinks, strangely, _If I could keep you, I would_, and Loki smiles a brittle, tense smile, and Thor closes his eyes and forgets to think.

The silence of this place is roaring. The cold is a live thing that burrows beneath his skin; and he's empty, there's nothing between his ribs or in the space between his knuckles, he's the void – the nothingness calls to him, breaks him apart, falling, falling –

And the darkness of this place would startle him if he were a living thing, if he had breath in his lungs and blood in his heart; but he is falling. Or letting go. Or perhaps he is flying, down, down – no. Floating. He is floating. On a bed of needles, he is swimming in the nothingness – and the weight is dragging at him, pulling him into its arms – does it have arms? Is this how it feels – is this how he felt? Just the faintest hint, the barest of touches – and he's not scared, _have you ever known me to nervous_? No. No.

_This is not so bad_, he thinks, and the faint pull of his lips feels like a smile.

* * *

Loki curls on his side and folds his cold hands against his cheek and wonders why he's crying.

* * *

Natasha slams her fist into the sparring bot, following the motion with a quick twist and an elbow to the throat. She deflects the oncoming blow and uses her hold on the limb to pull herself closer to the bot. Within the span of a second, her legs lock around the waist of the bot – and an instant after that, the bot is on the floor. The lights of its visor flicker and dim.

She's been at this for over an hour. She has her hair up in a messy bun, and the stray hairs that have escaped are plastered to the back of her neck with sweat. She is anxious, on edge with Loki in the building, and the repetition of training – the elegant twist of body and the contraction and slide of muscles, the ache that settles across every inch of her – is a flame that scours the weakness and leaves her calm and sharp-minded.

_Just one more_, she thinks, and she reactivates the bot and allows it to amble out of the sparring arena, to be replaced by one that is not quite so damaged. The bot that comes out next is lithe, built for speed and dexterity. Natasha brushes her fingertips against the knives hidden on her person and smiles.

'Just one more' turns into two more, five more, a dozen more, until the second hour passes and Natasha is panting and dripping sweat, her shirt damp and sticking to her back and underarms and chest. She finally calls it to a halt when she fails to intercept a blow to her midsection that throws her off-balance, cursing herself for not having better control of this foolish behavior. When she powers down the bots and stumbles out of the arena, her fatigue hits her fully for the first time; she has to bend over and place her hands on her knees and breathe through her mouth until the sensation passes.

When finally she is able to stand up straight without her head spinning, Natasha catches a glimpse of herself in one of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors used to study form and raises an eyebrow. She is a sweaty mess, hair stuck to her face and cheeks red and flushed, and she is just now beginning to feel it, her skin too hot, restricting her, squeezing at her organs. She is drenched, shirt soaked completely through in some areas, and the sweat beginning to dry on her arms and face makes her skin prickle uncomfortably. _Shower_, she decides; but by the time she makes it to the elevator her stomach realizes it hasn't had any sustenance in several hours and growls its complaint, and she quickly changes her mind.

_Food first_, she thinks. Protein and water, and then she'll take a shower, and then she'll order a pizza or something just as deliciously unhealthy and eat it in front of the TV, because she's been cheated out of a vacation and she damn well deserves a break – and besides, that show she pretends she doesn't like, House Hunters International, is having an all-day marathon. Maybe she'll flush Clint out of his hiding spot and bully him into joining her.

Some ten minutes later she is just emerging from the kitchen, alternating bites of a peanut butter protein bar with lengthy quaffs of vitamin-fortified water, when she spies Steve on the couch in one of the many lounges in the Tower. He's talking at a rapid pace to someone over the phone Stark specifically designed for him to be as 'retro' as possible, able to make calls and receive them and not much more than that. It can't even take pictures. Stark calls it his Grandma Phone. Steve uses it anyway.

As she approaches Steve, his words take on meaning; it becomes clear after just a moment that he's speaking to Coulson. He's tense, shoulders stiff, and the words that come out of his mouth are barbed with steel.

Natasha takes a seat on the couch opposite Steve, sips at her water, and raises her eyebrows at him in greeting. He grimaces in response, pushes a hand through his hair, and says, "Look –Coulson – no offense, but I'm _telling_ you, he's not ready –"

A flurry of words from the other end of the line, and Steve says, "I _know _we haven't got a lot of time, but he needs to rest. He had a fit yesterday, he can't even eat solid food – he's hardly awake for more than ten minutes at a time. It's not going to –"

Steve's jaw tenses as Coulson responds, the volume too low for Natasha to hear clearly. She mouths, "Speakerphone," at Steve, and he glances at her, nods, and manages to find the correct button before Coulson stops speaking.

"– not an option right now," Coulson is saying, voice surprisingly calm for a man who's talking to the superhero he's idolized his entire life. "When I say 'we don't have a lot of time', I mean it; now that we're looking for it, our sensors have been picking up a lot of strange signals in this quadrant, and now Thor is missing and presumably in danger. Whatever this Thanos is planning, he's getting ready to put it into motion, and we _need _to know what we're up against."

"With all due respect –"

"I'll be there in an hour. Wake him up and keep him awake."

Steve starts to protest, but then the phone blips and the line goes dead. He stares at the phone in disbelief – Coulson? Hanging up on _him_? – and slowly his jaw clenches, a muscle ticking at the corner of his mouth. Natasha takes another bite of her protein bar, chews, and says, "Wow. I didn't think Coulson had it in him."

Steve lets out a long, slow breath and places the phone on the low-slung coffee table, clasping his hands together in front of him. "Loki's not _ready _to speak to anyone," he says, as if he hadn't heard her. "Forget about how he is physically – what he went through there, what Thanos _did _to him – he's not going to be able to speak about that, not for a long time. We need to be patient."

"We can't afford to be patient," Natasha says quietly, because Steve and Tony have already filled Natasha, Clint, and Banner in, and the situation is dire. If Thor is in as much danger as Loki – if Thanos is really in Jötunheimr like Loki seems to think he is – if Thanos is as powerful as Loki's tale makes him out to be – Natasha suspects that they're burning through borrowed time; in the span between one second and the next, at any moment, war could be upon them.

Steve's jaw clenches and his eyes darken, but he doesn't refute Natasha's statement. So she sits and waits, because she knows that sometimes that's what people need, and right now Steve isn't sitting across from her in one of the many lounges of Avengers Tower; right now, Steve is some seventy years in the past yanking tubes out of that friend of his, hauling him off the table, ignoring the sickness bubbling in his stomach because Bucky isn't Bucky anymore, he's something else, something less yet somehow more.

Natasha met Bucky before she knew he was Bucky. He was an ally, a friend, a sometimes-lover, and she had liked him, perhaps even loved him, if she were even capable of love back then. After the Winter Soldier's death – after he remembered, after he brought the gun to his temple – she had sat Steve down and told him, calmly as she could, who he had become. She'd spent the rest of the day in the gym, hours and hours of training until her vision bled gray and her very skin seemed to have been set ablaze.

Steve pretends he's not affected by it, and everyone else knows it's bullshit, and at this point they all know each other well enough to talk about it without _talking _about it; but sometimes he just needs the quiet, just needs to think, so Natasha sits and finishes her protein bar and waits for Steve to thaw.

Finally, Steve sighs and shakes his head and stands in one easy movement, body unfurling from its seated position. "Have you been to see him?" Steve asks. For a moment, Natasha's fingers spasm and curl tightly around the water bottle; but then, a heartbeat later, she relaxes her shoulders and loosens her grip and says:

"No. Not yet."

"Do you want to?"

Natasha looks at him, holds his gaze for a few moments, face kept carefully blank. Does she? She mulls it over, holds the question deep within her, and tries to imagine. It is strange, because while she could never hate Loki the way Clint did – does – because Clint can remember loving him, she hated him in her own way, she did. She had only known that her partner had been compromised, and this creature who called himself a god was responsible for it, and Natasha Romanoff is not accustomed to not knowing, isn't accustomed to not understanding what's going on; and there had been unbridled madness in his eyes when he had made his bargain with her, a sheer _truth _to his words that had sent dead men's fingers dancing across her spine.

Natasha Romanoff is not easily spooked. Because of her nature, perhaps, or because of something They put into her after they broke her apart – whatever it is, Natasha is unperturbed and unbent in the face of terror. But Loki isn't terror, just as the Hulk isn't brute strength; Loki is chaos, unbridled chaos, and he's always _this _close to slipping, to losing control.

Natasha takes a deep breath. "Yeah," she says, "I want to come."

And Steve gives her a half-smile like he might just understand.

* * *

Bruce looks up, surprised, when the elevator leading to the medical center dings and Natasha and Steve step out. He has to raise an eyebrow at Steve's state: obviously distraught, frustration and worry warring in his eyes, jaw clenched and a muscle twitching in his cheek. Natasha, on the other hand, looks cool and calm, every inch the professional despite her sweat-slicked hair and the damp circles around her neck and underarms.

Bruce clears his throat and minimizes the screen he had been surveying, a compilation of data tracking Loki's status over the time he's been on Earth this time around. Usually the only thing – or, rather, person – who can push Steve to this state is Tony when he's feeling particularly testy, but Tony is currently locked up in one of the workshops. The last time they talked, Tony had muttered something about medieval torture devices, Pepper, and scotch, and Bruce had figured he didn't want to know much more than that. The point is, though, that Tony isn't available, and so Steve is agitated for some other reason, which is Concerning with a capital 'C'.

"Well, don't you two look … happy," Bruce says. "Is there, ah, something going on here that I should know about?"

"We have a slight problem," Natasha says. She leans against a counter and drinks deeply from her water bottle.

"Oh, wonderful," Bruce says. "How 'slight' is 'slight'? Because if it's on the far end of slight, you might want to reconsider our current location. The instruments here are … somewhat delicate." He smiles, a twitch of his lips.

Natasha snorts and lifts the corner of her mouth. "Coulson wants to debrief Loki," she says.

Bruce raises his eyebrows. "What? Loki?" He jerks his thumb at the closed door leading to the private ward not ten feet from where he stands. "_That _Loki?"

"You know another one?" Steve says, and because his voice is sharp and his arms are crossed over his chest, Bruce's eyebrows elevate further until they are hovering somewhere around his hairline. Steve obviously notices this, because he mutters, "Sorry. But he can't just … he can't just walk in here and expect Loki to tell him everything about Thanos, Loki's just not – he's not _ready _for that."

"Steve," Natasha says, all honeyed sweetness, "if you say that _one more time _I will staple your mouth shut. And I will laugh in glee as I do it."

Bruce blinks and wonders if his eyebrows have somehow permanently relocated themselves into a perpetually shocked expression. Steve looks like he's considering, just for a moment, saying something just to be contrary – but then his mouth snaps shut and he nods, short and sharp, and says, "He'll be here in an hour. Less, now. Forty minutes, maybe."

"I … okay. Um. Well, he's – he should be awake," Bruce says. "I went in about an hour ago to see how he was doing, and he was just waking up."

"How was he?" Steve asks. "He wasn't doing so great yesterday – I mean, I'm no doctor, but he looked … bad."

"Yes, Dr. Banner," Natasha says, "Tell us all about your patient." She smirks around the rim of her water bottle. Bruce frowns and picks at the bottom of his shirt, smoothing the material between his thumbs.

"It's hard to say," Bruce finally says. "He – you know, he healed himself up pretty good, but – he explained this to me when I went in to see him – it's not permanent. The best metaphor I can come up with is like it's … magical stitching. He stitched himself up and sort of … layered his energy over his injuries, like a bandage – and it's basically, the magic is holding it together and showing his body what it's supposed to end up like, and his body will heal to that point naturally. It's complicated," he adds, cheeks heating, when Steve looks at him as though he has gibberish pouring out of his mouth. "But it makes sense, if you think about it."

"And?" Natasha says, because she knows he has more to say – she always knows, of course, because she's been trained her entire life to know what other people are thinking.

Bruce takes off his glasses, fiddling with them in his hands, and wrestles his thoughts into submission. "He, uh – he doesn't really have enough juice to keep his ... spells? Spells, I guess – they're taking up more energy than he thought, I think, because he looked – well, he's really frustrated, he thought he'd be up and walking around no problem by now, but he's sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place: if he tries to keep his spells in place, his body doesn't have enough energy to actually go towards finishing the healing; if he lets his spells fail, he's right back where he started, broken bones and all."

"Catch twenty-two," Natasha says, rolling the words over across her tongue and between her teeth, and Bruce shifts uncomfortably under her gaze. He's come a long way from the days of hiding in alleys clothed in dust and regret, come a long way towards accepting, even embracing the beast – creature? person? – living inside him; but something in her eyes, that wariness she's never quite lost, reminds him of the green-tinted insanity and desperation that had come so very close to ruining him.

"What's going to happen, then?" Steve asks. The normalcy of his voice, good old Steve with his frank, concerned tone, brings Bruce out of his thoughts, drops him back in the present. "If he doesn't have enough energy either way – it's not like you can just give him a shot and a couple of pills and make it all better. But Ásgarðians are tough; we've all seen what Thor's bounced back from. So Loki should be the same, right?"

Bruce shrugs. "We've never had a situation like this, Steve – sure, Thor's like a … a steamroller, or something, he just keeps going, but Loki's going to take a while to heal, a _long _while. It's not just that he's hurt, it's that his body is failing, it's shutting down. The main thing is that he has to eat. He's on an IV, yeah, and that's giving him all the nutrients and the enzymes to catalyze them he needs; but that's no long-term replacement for a good burger and a side of fries, you know?"

"Somehow I doubt he'll be eating burgers anytime soon," Natasha says, voice dry.

"No. But hopefully soon we can get him on milk and some bread, some more broth, stuff that's easy to digest; and if we can't get him off liquids, as far as substitutes go, Ensure is pretty good. The real issue is calories – I don't know if all Ásgarðians are like Thor, that they eat, what, ten thousand calories a day? But I can't imagine that Loki'll be able to manage even a fifth of that for a long while. I'm just worried that he's going to end up wasting away even more, and he – he really can't afford to lose any more weight at this point." Bruce grimaces, realizes he's holding his glasses a bit too tightly, and forces himself to relax his hold. Very carefully, he slips them back on.

Natasha makes a thoughtful noise in the back of her throat, crossing her arms and settling her weight onto one hip. Despite the post-workout clothes and the sweat and the fatigue heavy on her shoulders, she strikes an impressive figure.

Steve is shaking his head. "And Coulson honestly thinks this is the best time to give Loki a visit?"

"You were the one talking to him, not me," Natasha says. "Besides. Coulson knows what he's doing. He's been a SHIELD agent practically since he was potty-trained." At Steve's look, she shrugs and says, "That's how the rumor goes, anyway."

"Right, then," Bruce says, because he's not entirely comfortable with the direction this conversation is heading, "Let's just – go in and see how he is. Okay? Okay." He smiles that unassuming plastic smile that the others have learned to be wary of, and heads toward Loki's room without waiting for Steve and Natasha to respond.

Loki is awake, but hardly, when Bruce enters the room with Steve and Natasha trailing close behind. His eyes are half-lidded and dull with sleep, and he is so burrowed under the blankets that he seems little more than a lump; but then he straightens out, slowly, and drags himself into a seated position, and even emaciated and gray-faced with an IV feeding nourishment into his wasted veins he manages to look regal, straight-backed, hands clasped in his lap.

Bruce is reminded, forcefully, that Loki was a prince, once, of a great and shining realm so mighty that its people are considered gods. Thor has spent long hours describing the wonders of Ásgarðr to Bruce and the others, especially when they've all had a slight bit too much to drink. When Thor drinks, Bruce knows, he adopts a false cheer that is bright and exuberant and almost painful to watch; and when he drinks more, the cheer drips away and he is left with nostalgia and melancholy that _is_ painful to watch, especially if Bruce is sober – which he nearly always is.

"Dr. Banner," Loki murmurs, dipping his head in greeting. "A pleasure, I'm sure. And the Lady Romanoff and Captain Rogers. How very kind of you to visit." He's peering up at them beneath his eyelashes – startlingly dark against the pallor of his skin, longer than most men's eyelashes are wont to be – and it's … strange, almost, that he can adopt such a calm façade.

"Loki," Steve says, and out of the corner of his eye Bruce can see that he's itching to reach out and offer Loki a friendly touch, as he would to any of his injured soldiers; but he stays still and merely gestures at Loki and adds, "You're looking … better. Did you sleep well?"

Loki's head tilts to the side, a smile – thin and sharp, unkind – twitching at his lips. "Your concern is touching. My rest was satisfactory, thank you."

(He'd woken three times in the night, Jarvis had told Bruce, with tears on his face and hysteria in his eyes; and each time he had slipped back into an uneasy sleep, and Bruce wonders just how much practice Loki has with this: pretending he's okay when he's not okay at all).

"I assume that this is not simply a visit of courtesy," Loki says, and somehow – although his words are honeyed and soft, almost _sweet_, there is an undercurrent of poison, a sharpness to his words that makes Bruce's neck prickle. With his eyes half-lidded and that strange, small smile on his lips, skin bone-white and hair blacker than Bruce thought possible, Loki looks like a wraith, a half-thing, a wasted creature whose very breath seduces all those around it.

Bruce suppresses a shiver, barely.

"No," Natasha says. "Coulson called – you remember Coulson, don't you? He's the agent you stabbed through the heart."

Loki's smile twitches and fades to a stretched-thin grimace, then widens. "Ah," he says, "Yes, I remember." He leans back ever-so-slightly, back pressing into the pillows, shoulders drooping momentarily before straightening. Bruce wouldn't have noticed any of it if he hadn't been paying close attention.

Next to Bruce, Natasha breathes out slowly, deliberately. "He's going to be here soon to debrief you. He wants to know everything there is to know about this Thanos –" (and Bruce pretends he doesn't see the thinning of Loki's lips, the strange look that flashes across his eyes that Bruce recognizes as fear and something else) "—and I should warn you, Loki: Coulson can smell bullshit from a mile away."

"Truly," Loki says, sounding bland and bored and almost-but-not-quite-but-yes-it's-there sarcastic. "How interesting. I did not know humans were capable of possessing such … _extraordinary _olfactory senses. I am, I admit, impressed."

"He's much more impressive in person, I assure you," Natasha says. Bruce has known Natasha long enough at this point to realize that there are knives lurking beneath her smile. But Loki – he doesn't know Loki, doesn't know the slightest thing about him, so when Loki laughs – no, not quite; the sound is too soft, too subtle to qualify as a true laugh, more of an amused _exhale _than anything else, if that's even possible – when Loki makes that strange sound borne forth on a gust of breath, Bruce doesn't have even a remote idea of what it means.

Bruce is just thinking that they are, perhaps, in over their heads when Loki shifts his shoulders and looks at Bruce, a smile on his lips that at least seems sincere. "If it is not too much to ask," he says, and he hesitates, fingers twitching and grasping at the fabric, before adding, almost uncertainly, "I am rather thirsty. A drink would be much appreciated." And he waits a beat and then amends himself, "Of the non-alcoholic variety, of course. I have no interest in the strange drink you call scotch – it smells akin to a wet bilgesnipe skin left out to rot."

"I'll get it," Steve says, and then he looks to Bruce as if to say, _Is that okay?_

Bruce nods at him and says, "Get him a glass of water. Add a little bit of sugar – a teaspoon or two." Steve nods and slips away; and then, to Loki, he says, "If you're feeling up to it tomorrow, we can start you on some milk – okay?"

Loki's eyebrows disappear somewhere up along his hairline. "_Milk_?" he says, and the way he says it the word sounds _dirty_, almost. "Do I _look _like a toddling child to you?"

Bruce blinks, taken aback for a moment – but then again, Thor had been surprised to learn that milk was a common beverage for adults, had been _offended_, in fact, when he was offered some for the first time. "It's … not just kids drink milk," Bruce says. "And, sorry, but you're not really in the position to be arguing."

For a moment, Loki's lips thin and his brows draw together, and he looks _dangerous_, feral and ethereal, as if without a second thought he would claw Bruce's eyes out and watch with unfettered delight as they burst and ran over his cheeks. But then he relaxes minutely, shoulders slumping back, and he bows his head as if in submission. His tone is soft and measured when he says, "Very well. And then I will be rid of this apparatus of yours – yes?"

"If you can stomach the milk, sure."

Loki _hmm_'s and peers up at Bruce, tongue appearing briefly to wet his lips, and Bruce has the strangest feeling that Loki is stripping off his skin with his eyes, pulling him apart to see what's inside – and his gut jerks and he has to swallow, hard, look down at his hands to avoid that pale gaze.

_This would be much easier if you'd stayed unconscious_, Bruce thinks, and can't help but sigh.

"Dr. Banner," Jarvis says, amiable as ever, "Agent Coulson has arrived. Shall I send him to you?"

"Uh, yeah, thanks," Bruce says. Jarvis makes a sound of affirmation, and then Bruce looks over at Natasha and frowns slightly. "I didn't think he'd be here so soon."

Natasha shrugs. "Honestly? I'm surprised he wasn't here sooner."

Steve arrives then with the glass of water, saying, "Did I hear that right? Coulson's here? Already? It's only been, what, forty minutes? He said it'd be at least an hour."

"Coulson likes to keep people off balance," Natasha says.

"The water, please," Loki says, but he recoils slightly when Steve reaches out to hand him the glass. Instead, Steve places it on Loki's bedside table; and from there Loki very carefully picks up the glass with two hands, murmuring his thanks before raising the drink to his lips. Steve is frowning, and when he crosses his arms over his chest he looks so much like Tony that Bruce nearly chokes on his next breath.

"So," Bruce says, then clears his throat. "Are we all sticking around to hear what Loki has to say, or what?"

"If you honestly think I'd miss this, you're hallucinating," Natasha says flatly. "Besides. I don't think I trust leaving Coulson in a room along with him – who knows, we might come back to find Coulson standing over a pile of ash."

Loki looks somewhat taken aback by this. "I may not be in the best of shape," he says, "but I am _more _than capable of dealing with a single mortal, no matter how tremendous his olfactory senses."

"Keep telling yourself that, sweetheart," Natasha says, and Loki looks so baffled by this new example of 'mortal vernacular' that Bruce can't quite stop himself from laughing in time. He manages to turn it into a cough, and at first he's worried that Loki isn't fooled, but Loki looks so … _lost_, so completely confused, that Bruce figures he's safe, for now.

A brief tap on the door makes Bruce start in surprise – Loki's hands, he notices, have gone very white, and for a moment his baffled look turns to one of wide-eyed fear – and Natasha deigns to give him an odd look before saying, "Come on in, Coulson."

The door slides open, and there he is: bland smile, pressed suit, hands folded over a suitcase. "Agent Romanoff," he says, greeting her with a nod. "Dr. Banner." His bland smile flickers into something almost apologetic when he aims it at Steve. "Captain Rogers. My apologies if I were perhaps a little terse with you earlier."

A muscle in Steve's jaw twitches, but he gives a short, jerky nod and says, "It's not a problem. The way things are right now, everybody's temper is running a bit hot."

Coulson's lips quirk upwards just for a second, and Bruce knows from the brief tension in his clasped hands that he doesn't believe Steve, not for one second; but he just says mildly, "Right, then. To business. Mr. Odinson –"

"_Don't_," Loki suddenly snarls, and he looks _feral_, hands hooked and clawing at his blankets, his face twisted into something monstrous. "_Don't _call me that. I am no son of Odin – I am not his by blood or by whatever the wretched thing is he calls _love_, and I refuse to be referred to as that!"

Coulson blinks; slowly, deliberately. "Well, then," he says. "I see Mr. Stark wasn't just making up stories when he said you reacted badly when called that. Thor has mentioned before that you are related to him by blood, but that doesn't explain your distaste for the name. I'm very curious."

Loki's face flattens, smoothes out into sharp lines and shadowed angles, and he says, each word short and clipped, "Surely, Agent Coulson, you do not expect me to consider the man who gave me up to – to that –"

And, for a moment, it seems as though he's trying to say Thanos; but then he swallows, hard, and the next breath he takes is ragged, and the fists his hands form are white-knuckled and bruising. When he closes his eyes, Bruce realizes that he can see every vein, every pulse of his blood, in the blue-marbled expanse of his lids.

Coulson is watching, and waiting, and he hasn't reacted at all; still has that bland half-smile on his face, still is relaxed and loose in his stance, and Bruce sometimes wonders just who it is that he's working for; just what it is that hides behind the calm front SHIELD offers up to them. Bruce _likes _working for SHIELD, likes the trust that Fury hands him, and, no, he doesn't agree with everything the agency does, but he understands why they do it, mostly; but sometimes the inhuman nature of the agency, the almost machine-like properties that their agents take on, chills the very marrow of his bones.

Deep inside, the Hulk grunts and mutters words Bruce can't quite catch, and he knows that the Hulk agrees with him.

Coulson clears his throat. "Well. I've been told you're not quite up to getting out of bed yet, so we'll be conducting this interview in here. Now, is there a chair, or something of the like?"

"In the closet," Bruce says automatically, pointing. "There should be a couple of folding chairs."

Sure enough, Coulson quickly procures a chair, then pauses briefly before closing the door. "Let me guess. You all want to stay?" And the guilty look that Steve aims in Bruce's direction is enough answer for him, for his lips quirk and he drags three more chairs out of the closet before shutting the door.

While Coulson is setting up recording equipment on the bedside table, Bruce takes the opportunity to study Loki. His head is bowed again, but this time his eyes are firmly on his clasped hands. Every so often his shoulders twitch, as if he's struggling to keep them from sagging, as if he's struggling not to curl into himself. Bruce looks and sees a man trying to appear strong; the Hulk raises its head and sniffs and smells fear and anger and the cold clench of despair.

As Bruce watches, Loki unclasps his hands and rubs at his chest, fingers splayed out across the expanse of his shirt. He lets out a long breath, and even from his spot at the foot of the bed Bruce can see the frost that settles over his lips, delicate and glittering with cold. When he inhales, the frost recedes, and Loki's fingers press at his lips when he frowns.

"Cool trick," Coulson says, settling in the chair next to Bruce. When Loki raises his head to stare at him, fingers still splayed across his mouth, he gestures and says, "The frost thing. It's – fascinating."

"It was an accident," Loki says, and he lowers his hands from his lips to cradle it in his lap, instead. He's watching Coulson with an undeniably wary look in his eyes.

Coulson shrugs. "Well, that's okay. We're not really here to talk about magic tricks, anyway." And for some reason Loki stiffens at this, anger flaring across his countenance only to disappear just as quickly. Coulson smiles his unflappable smile and says, "We're really here to talk about the guy who did this to you. Thanos, you said his name was? We need to know everything about him; his allies, what we can expect from him, his plans … anything you can think of, no matter how unimportant you think it is, tell me. I'll decide if it's important or not."

Loki is quiet for a long moment, eyes downcast. It shouldn't be possible for a living creature to be that still, Bruce thinks, as if frozen in time and place; and when Loki's fingers twitch in his lap as he takes a deep breath, Bruce is startled because he hadn't expected the movement.

"Thanos is an ancient enemy of Ásgarðr," Loki finally starts, voice low. "As I told the Captain and Mr. Stark, the last war he waged was before my birth, and it took a thousand years for Ásgarðr and her allies to crush his armies." He breathes out, visibly calming himself, and continues. "At the time, he wielded a weapon known as the Infinity Gauntlet, powered by the six Infinity Gems: Soul, Mind, Power, Space, Time, and Reality. Each Gem grants the owner the power over their particular domain, and when all six are gathered and bound together in the Gauntlet, their power is magnified so that the owner has power enough to alter the universe in any way he sees fit.

"Even without the Gauntlet, Thanos is a formidable enemy; he is ancient and powerful, and willing to use any means necessary to please Death, his … mistress, of a sort." When he says that, he shifts uncomfortably on the bed. "Death, of course, isn't the only creature who wields power over the dead," he says, "but she is by far the most powerful, and the most bloodthirsty."

"I'm sure they make a lovely couple," Natasha says, sounding for all intents and purposes perfectly sincere. Loki's head jerks, as if he'd forgotten he'd had an audience, and then he stares at her for a long moment, face blank. . She stares right back, unflinching.

Bruce hides a smile behind his hand.

"So," Coulson says, "how'd they beat him?"

Loki's tongue, a pale sliver of pink, darts out to wet his lips; and then he says, "The allied realms were unable to stay Thanos's destruction so long as he wielded the Infinity Gauntlet, so Odin tore Thanos's arm from his body and used the Gauntlet's power to set the universe right again and to seal Thanos away in the darkness between Yggdrasill roots."

"But he's back," Coulson says.

Loki's hands form white-knuckled fists. "I would think that rather obvious," he says, voice hoarse.

Coulson _hmm's_. "But he doesn't have the Infinity Gauntlet?"

"No," Loki says, "the Gauntlet is deep within the vaults of Ásgarðr, well-hidden and well-protected. But, while it's necessary, the Gauntlet itself is not the source of power; and the Infinity Gems were scattered throughout the Universe. Somehow, one of the Gems found its way back to Thanos: the Mind Gem. You are familiar with its workings, if you recall."

"The scepter?"

Loki nods. "The Gem itself remains in Thanos's possession. Without its brethren to enhance its power, or the Gauntlet to direct and focus its energies, it remains weak. But Thanos's armies are far-reaching, and his allies are many, and I do not doubt that he is well on his way to finding the others."

"So, basically, we're screwed, is what you're saying," Bruce says, and he's surprised his voice remains steady. He waits for Loki to dismiss his fear, tell him that he is a foolish mortal; but Loki simply lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug and says:

"The army Thanos sent to Miðgarðr was but a small component of the creatures he has at his disposal. And from his presence in Jötunheimr we can gather that he's infiltrating the nine realms, using to his advantage the blind bloodlust of the HrimÞurs; and if he allies himself with Jötunheimr, its sister realm Muspellheimr is sure to follow soon after." Loki shakes his head, a little helplessly. "Even without the Gauntlet, the war he is setting into motion will stretch across the Nine. He will destroy _everything _to gain the favor of his mistress. Your little team will not be enough, won't be _nearly _enough, to turn back his forces. If you insist on surviving, your realm must mobilize for war."

Coulson blinks, slowly, says, "Well, then. It's a good thing we're not the only people in the business of saving the world," and smiles.


	9. Chapter Eight

I'd like to take this time to announce two things: 1) I have a (sort of) beta! AKA I've bullied my dad into reading Invictus, and he's been very helpful (mainly because he's just as much of a pretentious perfectionist as I am) with editing, figuring out plot points, etc. The funny thing is that my dad actually likes Invictus, strangely enough.

And, 2) Much thanks so SingSongSilence, who has become my, quote, "world building buddy". I haven't had much time to confer with SSS yet (which is also why this chapter was delayed - my apologies), but eventually we'll be working together to flesh out the other realms. If anybody else would like to send me a few ideas, I'd much appreciate it; I can't promise that I'll use what you suggest, but any little thing helps.

Thanks so much, as always, for being such lovely people; and onwards to the next chapter. Constructive criticism & nit-picking are very welcome!

* * *

INVICTUS

**Chapter Eight**

Coulson stays for three hours, suit jacket thrown over the back of his chair, sleeves pushed up almost to his elbows, jotting down what Loki says the instant it leaves his mouth despite the recording equipment humming away quietly on Loki's bedside table. He is, Loki finds, an attentive audience; and when he is interrupted by one of the three members present of the 'boy band', as Coulson refers to them—which strikes Loki as strange, as he is confident that the Agent Romanoff is most certainly not a boy—he very calmly shuts them up by looking, almost casually, in their direction.

Discretion, control, the subtle machinations of a man who's well accustomed to pulling strings: Loki can respect that about a person, and Coulson has them in spades. He is, Loki realizes as the hours pass, the unofficial leader of the Avengers; although he is but an ordinary mortal—horribly, pathetically mortal; and yet Loki somehow failed to kill him, and that is worth looking into, because Loki never misses his mark with a blade—the others defer to him as their superior. It is not obvious, and Loki doubts the Avengers even realize it—he is sure that, if he were to ask them, they would name either the Iron Man or the Captain as their leader—but Loki has eyes and ears attuned carefully to subtlety, the result of hundreds of years of watching and listening and learning.

At some point, Loki realizes that the Widow is surveying him as carefully as he is surveying Agent Coulson, and there is a moment wherein he feels horribly as though he is falling, as though his stomach has lodged itself in the hollow of his throat. _You fool_, he snarls at himself, _You complete halfwit! _Because he is Loki, he is the God of Lies, of Manipulation, of Deceit, and if he wishes to survive he must keep his wits about him; he cannot allow her to so nakedly survey him, not without altering the message he wants her to receive. So, very carefully, Loki pushes aside what thrums inside him like a sickness and instead wraps shadows over himself, schools himself into an expression of wary caution and fear that lurks in the crevices between his smile and his teeth, and tells Romanoff as best he can: _I am sick, I am unwell—but I am willing to help, I am truthful in what I offer, you must trust me_.

And by the minute softening of her features, a reaction that goes unchecked a heartbeat too long, Loki knows she has heard him, that she believes him; and when she fixes her mistake and reapplies nonchalance across her countenance, Loki knows that he has not lost everything, not quite yet.

What Loki finds most interesting is what Coulson says without saying, the details he omits and skirts over; and in those unspoken words Loki gains a more thorough understanding of the world he has fallen into, and is surprised by what he learns.

Coulson, Loki realizes, is under pressure from the one-eyed director named Fury; and the Director himself is under pressure from an external source, one that wields power even over the half-insubstantial organization of SHIELD. Hence Coulson's desperation—well hid, but desperation nonetheless—to know as much as he can as soon as possible regarding all that Thanos does and is and wants. Loki does not object to giving such information to SHIELD; he wants Thanos destroyed, he wants Thanos broken and begging for mercy at his feet, he wants Thanos's blood on his hands and in his hair, he wants to _scream _his laughter into Thanos's face—and he will give these mortals whatever information necessary to make that possible.

(In one of Coulson's more blatantly obvious hesitations, Loki realizes that SHIELD wants Thanos alive for reasons he can guess at, most of which involve the acquisition of information or perhaps harvesting his body for resources to manufacture weapons; this is unacceptable. Loki will not rest until Thanos has been destroyed, every last inch of him transfigured to agony. Let SHIELD think Loki is willing to bring Thanos in alive; Loki will rip Thanos's still-beating heart from his chest and peel his skin from his bones, and by the time he is done Thanos will be no more than a smear of flesh against the earth, and the mortal organization will have no power to stop him.)

More surprising is the realization that the Avengers are not the only warriors that Miðgarðr has to offer, and that Miðgarðr may, possibly, have a well of power that Loki had not previously known existed. Coulson hints at it, briefly: the existence of an organization filled with humans who are not quite human, beings who possess, in some way or form, powers befitting one of a status far above them. This, Loki thinks, requires further digging; and Loki only restrains himself from casting the spell to lay Coulson's mind out like a book before him because he is not sure he has the strength to keep himself hidden from Coulson's scrutinizing stare.

In truth, Loki is surprised by Coulson, and perhaps a little wary of him. He remembers the soft-spoken declaration, _You lack conviction_, and he remembers the way his spine had twitched and frozen at those words, remembers the _betrayal _he had felt, if only for a mere moment, that this mortal could see him so clearly while Thor could not. Thor is not overly perceptive, no; but that a _mortal _had seen past the carefully-applied façade … well. Sometimes, Loki thinks, Thor prefers to be blind.

Coulson and Agent Romanoff, Loki knows, are the ones to watch; they will require more than just routine caution to keep at bay. He will need to be aware around them, will need to have every twitch and falter of expression under his strict control; he cannot, will not, allow them to see more of him than he presents.

By the time Coulson stands and rolls his shoulders back, joints popping, Loki's head is swimming with new understanding and his tongue feels swollen and thick, clumsy in his mouth. He has told Coulson everything he knows from experience and lessons half-forgotten from his youth about Thanos: his weaknesses, his potential allies—Mephisto, Loki warns Coulson, may well rise to power beside Thanos to be cast aside like a toy when he has fulfilled his purpose; and with Mephisto comes all the dead things that reside within his halls—

(and Loki, fleetingly, thinks of Hela, even though he's trained himself not to, even though he knows thinking of his daughter will only bring the dull agony of separation; and for half a heartbeat, for the eternity that spans between one moment and the next, he recalls what she felt like in his womb with an intensity so dizzying it hurts; and he's not even aware he's trailed off until Agent Romanoff prods him to awareness with a few words.)

—and Loki realizes, oddly enough, that he has no dual purpose in this, other than the need that sears his veins to see Thanos punished, destroyed, stricken from the skin of the universe; and it is a rather disconcerting discovery he makes, that this is, perhaps, the most honest he has been in years, decades – perhaps even centuries.

He told Thor everything, once, before he learned to keep his thoughts to himself after he was met with laughter and jests and mocking a hundred too many times. But he was a child then, and children are foolish and weak, and his child-self was especially so, before he learned—before he was forced to learn—how to be strong.

Agent Coulson leaves, his three lackeys trailing behind him. Dr. Banner promises to be back in an hour to check on Loki, asks if he needs anything; and Loki shakes his head and twists his lips into a smile, and is glad to see him go. In the aftermath of their departure, the air of this place feels dank and cold and forgotten; and Loki, brushing his fingers across his lips, feels revulsion swell in his belly when he realizes that his mouth is painted with frost.

He has to fix this, Loki thinks. Magic cannot be left to its own devices, for it is a living, sentient thing, as much a crucial part of Loki as his heart; and the fact that it is slipping from him, acting of its own volition—the fact that he does not _notice _when he loses his carefully-maintained control—is terrifying, makes Loki feel for the first time as if he is really, truly falling apart. As if some essential, fundamental part of his being has been broken, and from those severed strands of his core he is unraveling.

Very carefully, Loki places his hands together in his lap, spreading his fingers out across the bedspread; with a thought and a twitch of his digits, the blanket bleeds from white to dark green; and with a thought more, gold patterns spiral themselves across the fabric. The result is not quite what Loki was expecting: rough around the edges, beautifully rendered where closest to his hands but fading in quality as it spreads outward, until the edges of his bedspread are a mangled mess of gold and green.

With a sigh, Loki gestures and returns the blanket to its original hue. It is, perhaps, a little greenish; but when Loki grits his teeth and forces the magic out of him, pushes his energy outwards from blood and fingers to the weave of fabric, the blanket fades back to its original pristine white. That done, Loki settles back against his pillows and rasps his teeth over the dead skin on his lips, carelessly fiddling with the cracks across the dry surface of his mouth.

_This is a problem_, Loki thinks, and he clasps his hands together and taps his fingers against his knuckles, and then closes his eyes to spend some time ruminating on this issue. His magic is stretched thin, bound tightly around himself, in his skin and his bones and his organs, helping hold him together while his body slowly heals again. He had thought—hoped—that his body would heal in a mere few days, and that then he would be hale and healthy enough to replenish his dwindling supply of energy; but he's yet too weak, and the strain of upholding the magic binding his energies is a heavy weight tying him down at all times, and he thinks, perhaps, that he had not fully understood the ramifications of what he was doing when he decided, foolishly, to 'heal' himself.

Loki exhales, long and slow, and holds his hands up so that he can study his forearms, the sharp ridges of the bones cresting out at his knuckles and wrists. Although his injuries aren't visible to the naked eye, he can sense them there, hiding under the surface; and he is an experienced enough seiðmaðr that he can recognize the traces of his magic sprawling across his skin. Very carefully, knowing full well that this will hurt, will possibly hurt quite a bit, Loki focuses on a series of wounds across his left forearm he knows are there and hesitantly begins to unravel the magic holding his skin together.

Inch by slow inch, his skin peels back and darkens from its near-white hue to an ugly purple-red, until Loki is withholding strained whimpers and soft pants from the pain of it, until there are four semi-healed wounds slashing apart the skin from the crook of his elbow to the inside of his wrist. The arm aches, seems to throb with pain; but so long as Loki holds his arm steady and does not twist his wrist, doesn't pull at the skin that is beginning to knit together again, he will be fine.

With quiet focus, Loki examines the wounds. They are ugly, yes, raw still, but they are well on their way to scarring. He _will_ have scars, yes, and many of them, but only for a few years, perhaps a decade at the most. They will fade as his skin replaces itself, his immortal body constantly recycling and reconstructing, until there are no physical reminders of what he had been subjected to in Thanos's care.

The pain is not so bad, Loki thinks; and when he again repeats his experiment with the blanket, his designs are a little clearer, a little more consistent in their elegance. Loki drums his fingers across the bedspread, closing his eyes briefly, and weighs his choices. He already feels a little more clear-headed, a little more straight-backed, with that meager portion of his magic returned to him, cycling freely through his bloodstream rather than being restrained to one task.

Loki runs his fingers gently over the raised scabs, applying only the barest hint of pressure, and wonders. He will heal more slowly without the aid of his magic, but he will be more in control of himself, and it's not as though he's been healing particularly quickly anyway. If he decides to reinforce a selected group of injuries with his magic – his damaged organs, the broken bones – while leaving the flesh wounds to heal naturally, he will have more energy to spare, will be able to walk around – will be able to do more than sit in a bed like an invalid and watch the world spin by.

(And, of course, if his magic is not being wasted on his healing he will have more of a chance of victory if – when – Thanos returns; and Loki would let every bone in his body shatter again if it meant he had the magical strength and control to rip Thanos limb from limb).

Able now to examine his work with a critical eye, free of the staggering pain that had seared through him while he first sent magic flooding through his system, Loki takes special note of the layering of his magic. So addled was he by the pain, he had done a horribly juvenile job, relying on brute willpower and sheer magnitude of magic in order to heal over the marks of his imprisonment. Perhaps he will not have to unravel his healing spells, not completely; perhaps he needs only to tighten the stitches, so to speak, snip off the excess strands of magic that do nothing save drain his energy. To be efficient, Loki knows, is to survive, is to _thrive_; and especially in such a state as this, he must be careful, precise, more so than he has ever been before.

Loki slips into the darkness cradled between his ribs, into his very core; and there he sits and breathes and extends himself in every direction, and he is disgusted, horrified at the state of things. The strands of his seiðr are thick and sloppy and tangled, and his magic is caught within the knots, festering without purpose or use. Tentatively—because he's never quite been so twisted like this, because one must always be careful when dealing with magic—he examines the twists and turns in his magic, noting where the strands are so knotted that he can hardly see where one wisp ends and the other begins. When he finally withdraws from himself, his lips are twitching deeper into a frown, because this will take time, won't it—perhaps a full day—and it's necessary, and he _knows _it's necessary, but all the same …

Loki presses his thumb and forefinger together at the bridge of his nose and stops himself from thinking. There isn't a question about it; he has to fix the mess he's made, and the sooner he does it the better; and as little as Loki is looking forward to the process (no doubt long and complicated and exhausting enough to rid his body of what little strength it still possesses) it must be done.

Loki breathes in slowly, and begins.

* * *

Clint feels as though he hasn't slept in days. His eyes are caked with grit and his mouth tastes like something sour and fetid, and when he was at the shooting range earlier today he had been a full centimeter off his mark, and when Clint can't shoot he has nothing.

He's nursing a cup of coffee, his usual, and the mug is practically as large as his head. He's drunk well over half of it, and he feels more tired now than he did before. He had blue-tinted dreams the night before, and the dream itself was pleasant, even calming to an extent, but he'd woken with a start anyway when his dream self had smiled—_smiled!—_at Loki; and he'd been dripping sweat, blankets kicked off and tangled around his legs; and this is by no means the first dream he's had that's washed in cerulean and azure and cobalt, and will certainly not be the last, but it still festers in him the same way every other dream before it has.

He takes a deep breath, taps his fingers against the rim of his coffee, wonders if that monster—_Not a monster,_ some part of him says; _He's not a monster, Clint_, and the voice somehow feels red, like danger and warning and maybe a little something like love—fine. _Fine_. He wonders if _Loki_, Loki who's _not _a monster (but he snorts into his coffee as he thinks it, so he has a long while yet to go, he thinks), wonders if Loki the annoying snotball little brother of Thor is in pain.

Viciously, perhaps, some part of him thinks: _Oh, I hope so_.

And that red-tinted voice says, _Clint. You're not thinking straight. Calm down. Breathe. You'll be fine._

And Clint calms down and breathes, and it does nothing for his temper, not really, because the blue-dream is alive in his head; and the part of him that still wants to do nothing more than _help _the bastard, still wants to do whatever a good little minion does for its master, sickens him, boils in his gut; and then Clint is angry again, fists clenching at his mug, and he feels awfully, terribly numb.

Coulson is here. Clint knows that. He came perhaps three hours ago to squeeze every ounce of information out of Loki that he could. Coulson had called him earlier, just after hanging up on Steve, to say that he would be at Avengers Tower soon; and that if Clint wanted to talk, it would have to wait until after the business with Loki was over, but that Coulson _wanted _to talk to him, very much so, and he had sounded, in fact, concerned.

"I know this is hard for you," Coulson had said, and the strangest thing about Coulson is that he always sounds bland and calm and collected; but Clint has come to know him so well that he notices the slight hesitation between words, the barest hint of a tremor in his voice. And Clint was reminded, forcibly, that Coulson had almost died with a spear thrust through his heart; that it had been months after the incident before Fury was finally confident enough about Coulson's survival that he told the Avengers what he had done.

And so Clint had said, truthfully, "It could be a lot worse. Let's focus on what needs to be done. When you're through with Loki, come see me."

"Will do," Coulson had said, and then he'd hung up in that strange, abrupt way of his that Clint has learned isn't the result of rudeness, but is rather the result of never quite having enough time for pleasantries or such luxuries as sleep.

And now Coulson has left the ward, if Jarvis is to be trusted—which, Clint supposes, _should _be a given at this point; but Clint is a spy, an assassin, and more than that he wears paranoia like a second skin, just as any professional in his particular line of work should, and trust will never be a given for him. Clint is on the large terrace at the very top of the tower, perched precariously on the edge. Below him, the view spirals away into speck-sized humans and cars the size of ants. In a way, it's beautiful; Clint tries very hard to notice the beautiful things in life.

Try as he might, though, Clint can see no beauty in Loki; and he knows that it's because his idea of Loki is blue-washed, and he knows that Natasha would give him the patented stare that's been known to kill lesser men and say, _You're being too emotional, Clint. Look at the facts. Look at what's being presented to us. Focus on the Now. What do you see?_

Clint doesn't want to see—but, no, that's not true. He desperately wants to see. There is a strange compulsion within him, a need that burns hot and fierce, that demands he sees Loki face-to-face, that he _proves _he will not break; and yet he is reluctant, because he is unsure of whether the pitiful sight of Loki in person will be enough to still the roiling in his gut.

He wants to hate Loki. Hate is good; hate means that he is still _Clint_, that blue has no place in this world of his. But hatred clouds the sight, and for what's coming, for the events unfolding, Clint needs control over every aspect of himself, needs to work with clarity and efficiency and accuracy, and he can't _do _that when every thought of the god makes revulsion, disgust, loathing roil in his stomach—and he can never tell, is it aimed at Loki, or at himself?

Sometimes, Clint is jealous of Natasha, and he knows he shouldn't be. He knows that she's not this way of her own choice, that she's been conditioned into what she is, that it's a struggle for her every day not to lose herself to the emotionless thing They wanted her to be. But it would be easier, wouldn't it? If he could just close his eyes and _forget_, if he could just erase that part of himself that makes him so very, very weak

(that makes him so very, very human)

and Clint wants nothing more than for this to be over. But men such as he don't get what they want, not without bloodshed and sacrifice and tragedy, and he can't afford to be this emotional about the job. Because that's all it is: a _job_. Just the latest in a long string of _Do what you're told _and _Don't fuck it up_, and Clint needs to treat it like it doesn't matter, like he's not _affected _by this.

Agents don't last long if they're affected by what they do, and there's a _reason_ Clint has lasted as long as he has in this profession.

So why is this so _goddamn _difficult?

Clint groans and rubs at his eyes, feeling tired and sore and more helpless than he can remember ever being before. He thinks that, right now, just what he needs is a few hours of sparring with Natasha, because when sparring with Natasha every single part of him needs to be focused, alert, concentrating …

(and Clint would like to think that it's just because Natasha trains like her life depends on it, and her intensity diffuses out to Clint; but really, and he's admitted this to himself before, it's because Natasha is better than he is at hand-to-hand combat, and if he's not focusing with every fiber of his being, he would be flat on his back in mere seconds—and what's the point of _that_?)

Clint stares out at the city, silent and still, and thinks, _Things have really gone to shit, haven't they_. And it's true, of course; after Loki came stumbling out of that portal two years ago

(and Clint _very determinedly _doesn't think about how awful he had looked, waxy and pale and sweaty, _very determinedly _ignores that voice in the back of his head saying, _If that wasn't the face of someone who'd just been tortured, I don't know what is_)

everything changed. Everything. Before, Clint was every inch the professional—even if he wasn't exactly, well, _professional _all the time—and he did his job and asked snarky questions but basically did what he was told, because he was a pawn and he knew that, but so long as he had his bow and arrows, as long as Natasha had his back, he was fine. But now he dreams in blue and wakes with swear gathered on his brow and screams stitched into the line of his lips, and sometimes … sometimes he can hardly stand to look at Natasha because of what he's done.

It's a ridiculous sentiment, of course, because Natasha has red in her ledger and red on her hands and red in her smile, and of all people Natasha would never judge him for what he's done; but nonetheless the sickness dwells in him and flushes his cheeks with shame. He's a broken man, he knows that and accepts it, but sometimes he just can't … sometimes it's just so _hard _to don the pretense of normality.

Clint closes his eyes briefly, and when he opens them again he stares without focus into the blue of the sky. Coulson should be here soon, he thinks; and the best thing about Coulson is that he knows Clint better than anyone, save for perhaps Natasha, but unlike Natasha Coulson doesn't make Clint want to be better. In a way, that makes Coulson safer, because Clint never has to _try_.

Five minutes pass before the door to the balcony hisses open and Coulson's voice floats over to Clint. "Sulking?" he calls out, and Clint knows he's amused by the slight upward swoop of his voice.

Clint snorts. "Have you ever known me to sulk, sir?"

"Well," Coulson says, and after taking a moment to hitch up his trousers he sits down at Clint's side, legs dangling over the edge of the balcony, "You're not exactly known for your cheer. But this is something else."

"Yeah, well, not much room for happy-go-lucky time when you've got an intergalactic war approaching."

The side of Coulson's mouth twitches downward, tension creasing his brow. "Ah. Yes, that."

Clint turns to face him more fully, one eyebrow quirked upward. "That's all you've got to say? 'Oh, yeah, that thing, certain death approaching us, right, I knew that'?"

Coulson lets out a long sigh, one hand fiddling with his tie, loosening it. His mouth is a thin line across his face. "At the moment, there's not much _to _say. I've already sent the recording of the conversation to Fury, and I'll be meeting with him to discuss prep for the war in—" (he checks his watch) "—an hour and twenty-seven minutes. I get the supreme honor of telling Fury the world is about to be attacked by an immortal being who could potentially have the power to wipe out half the universe with half a thought."

"Can't say I'm jealous," Clint says.

"No," Coulson agrees, "I wouldn't be jealous, either." His face tenses, then slides into an expression of exhaustion so profound Clint feels an echo of sympathy twist in his stomach. "Things are bad," Coulson says, murmuring the words. "We thought it was bad before, but the attack on Manhattan was nothing compared to what we're up against now. I—honestly, I don't expect all of us to survive this."

They're quiet for a handful of moments. Clint feels oddly numb. His skin is hot and his stomach is cold—like ice—like that smile Natasha gives when she's contemplating all the best ways to kill you—and he is numb. Unfeeling. Beneath his thighs, the veranda burns its steady, slow presence, releasing unto him the warmth it stole from the sun.

Two years ago, he gave all he had to protect this city from what's apparently just hors d'oeuvres compared to what's coming next. And there are children and families and lovers and young men and women just starting to live their lives out there, and no matter what's coming—no matter how fiercely Clint slaughters his own humanity, no matter how much of himself he gives—some of them, somewhere, are going to die. The world will be lit up with the desolate screams of those who've lost everything, the silent wailing of the dead.

"What're we gonna do?" Clint asks, voice hollow.

Coulson sighs and knuckles at his forehead; and when he pulls his hands away from his face, he is composed again, bland-faced. "We'll build an army, that's what. Pull together all the people we've been keeping an eye on. The Pyms. Strange. Wilson. Parker, too. T'Challa, if he'll agree to leave Wakanda. The Fantastic Four. I'll have to contact Xavier; it's about time the X-Men stopped hiding in the shadows. They can't keep the mutants' existence a secret forever."

"Great," Clint says, "You're going to pit a bunch of freaks in tights against a force that could level the universe. That's gotta take the cake for worst idea ever."

Coulson doesn't smile. "It's the best option we've got," he says, and then he looks at his watch and grimaces. "I have to go." He stands abruptly, smoothing out the wrinkles in his slacks, and then pins Clint with a flat glare. "Oh, and by the way. If you don't resolve this issue you've got with Loki by the time the war reaches us, I'm pulling you off active duty."

Clint reels back, startled. "What? How did you—"

"Natasha told me," Coulson says, voice clipped. "Now. Either you go talk to him, or you figure it out on your own; I don't care which, quite frankly. We've got a world to protect, and I can't have your emotions getting in the way. Are we clear?"

Clint's teeth ache from the pressure of his clenched jaw. "Crystal," he manages to say, and then Coulson grants him a small, sad smile, and turns to leave.

* * *

Loki is deeply immersed in his work of untangling the strands of his magic, aware only of the flicker of magic and the sear of his returning energy burning against his veins; and yet, without understanding why, he finds himself suddenly withdrawing from himself, muscles frozen, every fiber of his being straining to sense something that he knows is there.

His heart is staggering wildly, and he thinks, possibly, that he should be afraid—it could be that Agent Coulson has deemed him a liability, or perhaps his purpose has been served, or perhaps the minds of the mortals have caught up with them and they've realized that he is a criminal, a monster

(or perhaps it is Thanos, lurking in the shadows, but Thanos doesn't lurk, doesn't cower, and if he were here Loki would _know _it)

… but he doesn't feel afraid, not at all. Just tense and breathless, and there's a strange pull at the muscles in his stomach, like his body doesn't quite know what to do, and when the shadow beneath the door twitches and darkens, Loki feels only a desperate sort of longing.

The shadow twists and creeps outward, and the air above it undulates in a slow and hazy wave; and in a moment's time the vague outline of a form in gray is standing, elegant and tall, above him.

Loki's throat constricts to a narrow passage; and he knows the face of his visitor even before the features solidify and become recognizable, knows it better than he knows his own. _You are beautiful_, he thinks, furious in his intensity, and his entire being aches with it; and when his daughter pushes her hood back from her face, the gnarled, rotted part of her flesh hidden in shadow, he clutches tightly at his blankets and thinks, desperately, _This is a dream, this is—this cannot _…

Hela makes no sound as she moves to Loki's side, shoulders so still it is as though she's floating, not walking. She just looks at him for a long moment, her good eye wet and the gray of her lips whitened by the clench of her jaw; and she doesn't speak, and neither does he. He doesn't think he'd be able to, even if he tried.

Finally, Hela sinks down onto the bed beside him, perching on the edge with an ethereal sort of fluid grace, and she presses a gentle, gentle kiss to his brow. The pressure of her lips is nearly nonexistent, but he can _feel _her—and he knows that she is draining far too much of her magic for this, because Hela has dominion only over the dead, and every moment she spends in the realm of the living is a gamble.

"I've looked everywhere for you," Hela says, and her voice is cold and distant and far away, but deep, deep under the stillness of her words, Loki can hear the way she screamed when they tore her and her brothers from him.

"Hela," he finally manages to choke out, and he reaches out to touch her cheek before he remembers she is practically insubstantial. "You didn't … it wasn't necessary for you to …"

"_Don't_," Hela says, the word sharp and stiff. "Don't. You have no idea, Mother. Don't pretend as if it weren't necessary."

Loki swallows hard around the words he wants to say, because when it counts he's no good at them, and because he is re-memorizing every edge of his daughter's face, the slope of her nose—crooked, slightly, because of the hard ridges of infected flesh stretching from its bridge across her cheek, the dead one. She looks old and impossibly young, and as he watches the living side of her face withers and sags, cobweb-thin wrinkles splaying out around her mouth and eye; and her dead eye reforms itself, rotted skin shifting and smoothing to a hale pink, and Loki thinks it should be impossible to feel this much pride for someone, for anything.

When he rests his hands on the bed because he doesn't know what else to do with them, Hela reaches out and rests one frail hand over his; and the weight of her palm is practically nothing, just the barest hint of pressure, but Loki pretends he can feel her fingers over his, pretends he's allowed more than this half-life with his child.

"You shouldn't stay," Loki says finally, after some time has passed. He keeps his voice soft, and it wavers as he speaks. "Even your magic isn't enough to keep you safe from the Allfather's wards; I won't have you harmed on my behalf."

Hela looks at him for a long moment, both eyes a vivid, poison green, and her half-mouth purses into a frown. "I will stay," she says in a tone that demands acquiescence. "Rest. I'll not leave until you're asleep."

"Hela—"

"Sleep." A beat, then, softer, "_Please_, Mother. You need to conserve your energy. War hasn't yet met this realm; take the opportunity to rest." Her fingers twitch against his, flesh and muscle sloughing off her hands to reveal the pristine whiteness of her knucklebones.

_But how can I sleep_, Loki thinks, _knowing that you'll be gone before I wake?_

He hasn't seen his daughter in nearly a century, not since he won the right to spend a month with her in the depths of the realm she holds dominion over. He hadn't been able to touch her, to hold her close to him, and that had been a torture in its own right; but he had talked with her, and sat just below her throne while she reigned over Niflheimr, and he had felt so impossibly proud of her, his strange and beautiful daughter who was cast down from Ásgarðr and formed a kingdom from the ruins of the place she landed.

Leaving her had been like leaving a piece of himself behind—which Loki supposes is appropriate. Hela and her brothers, Jörmungandr and Fenrir, were born of Loki's magic and essence; they are the truest parts of himself given life. And yet Odin had torn them from him, as yet half-insubstantial wisps of magic just discovering their material forms; and he had screamed and begged, they were just _children_, _his _children—

And Loki can still remember with perfect clarity the look in Odin's eye as he ordered Loki's creations—his _children_—to be seized; the disappointment and rage and, there, just a flicker of it, _fear_.

His children were monsters, Frigga had explained to him as gently as she could. It was prophesized that Jörmungandr would bring about Thor's death; that Fenrir would swallow Odin Allfather whole; that Hela would lead the armies of the dead against Ásgarðr at Ragnarök, standing tall and proud at the helm of the ship Naglfar. And Loki—for Loki was yet young, still convinced that Allfather knew best, he _always _knew best—had believed her, believed that his creations—his _children_, his flesh and blood, who grew inside him and pressed their limbs against the lining of his womb—were abominations.

He never was quite able to quell his doubts; and finally Odin had given him leave to visit each of his children once a century: Jörmungandr at the depths of Miðgarðr's deepest oceans, Fenrir tethered and chained, Hela in the realm which hailed her as Queen.

Hela's hand solidifies and tightens around Loki's, and a band wraps itself around his heart and squeezes. She shouldn't be expending so much energy to see him; they both know this. For a long moment, Loki is overcome with selfish desire to keep his daughter by his side, if only for a little while longer; but as a mother he will always care far more for his children than for his own contentment. And so he squeezes her hand, gently, and says, "You must return to Niflheimr."

"I will do no such thing."

"As your mother—"

"As your _daughter_, and as Queen of a mighty realm that bows to no one, I refuse."

Loki's mouth twitches into a scowl. "Is this how the Queen of Niflheimr rules over her subjects? With bull-headed stupidity? If I did not know better, I would say you are Thor's child, not mine."

"If you knew better, you would realize that I am no child, and would respect my decisions."

"Hela—"

"Would you not grant me the simple luxury of sitting at the side of my mother's sickbed? I could feel you trapped between the fabric of my realm and yours, Mother; perhaps you have forgotten, but your death was nigh upon you when you—_foolishly_, I might add—decided to waste all your strength on an escape that very well may have been futile. Did you not consider perhaps using that strength to call upon me? I have a vast army of the dead at my disposal; I could have saved you, _without _nearly causing your death."

"You think I would knowingly drag you into danger beyond anything you can imagine? That I would bring my only daughter to her demise? The worms festering in your skull have finally succeeded at eating through your wits, I see."

"I am no toddling child you can coddle and keep from harm!"

Heat bursts to life in Loki's chest. "As if I did not know that! I am your mother, I am _meant _to _protect _you—and, oh, how _thoroughly _I've failed at that. The mistakes I've made would cover all the Nine in ink were I to write them all out; I could not live with myself if some error of my own making cost you your life."

"Your mistakes have already cost me my life!"

Whatever words Loki was planning on saying stutter to a halt, digging vowels and consonants into the sensitive flesh of his throat. When he inhales, the breath drags across his lips and tongue with knives and then settles into his lungs with an ache that burns as if a fire is eating him from the inside out.

Hela's eyes are on his, unwavering—and as he watches, the left eye droops and grays, rots away and slips down her cheek in some grotesque semblance of a tear. She did not mean to say that. She can't have meant to say that. But then she continues, bitterly, "You are not the only one who suffers. I am confined to a body that dies and rots and withers only to grow anew. I am alone in a realm of the dead and cursed. My mother is a broken thing that hardly has the strength to protect himself, let alone his children, and yet he plays pretend at fortitude, dares tell _me _that it is his job to protect me when he lies yet still on the cusp of death."

Loki swallows, and his stomach yawns wide and hollow.

Hela's voice softens. "I have been alone for all these centuries, Mother, relying on my own intelligence and strength to survive, to build myself a kingdom of the dead; do not tell me what it is I can and cannot do. If I wish to remain at your side, to look over you while you rest, it is not your place to refuse me that small luxury."

_You are no mother_, Loki tells himself, the very magnitude of his worthlessness weighing upon him with crushing force. _A mother would not allow her children to suffer as I have. A mother would never have been so selfish as I. A mother would have done whatever it takes so save her children from the Allfather's rage, even if it cost her own life._

Hela's hand is gently on his shoulder. "Rest," she says, and she must have layered her voice with some spell of persuasion, for the corners of Loki's vision darkens and blurs, white to gray. A mother would not sleep while her daughter drains her energy to sit by her side. A mother would be selfless, would she not? She would know to send her daughter away, even if it meant using force, even if it meant awakening her daughter's hatred, would she not?

Only a monster could have condemned his children to suffer the way Loki has. Only a monster could fail so completely as Loki has at protecting his get.

Sleipnir, ridden as a common mule by the so-called Allfather. Jörmungandr, hurled through the skin of the realms to curl, alone and miserable, in the deepest depths of Miðgarðr's oceans. Fenrir, bound with Gleipnir, his great jaws pierced through with Týr's sword. And Hela, trapped in the shadows between life and death, condemned to an eternity of her half-life.

If Loki had a heart, if Loki were not the monster fate decided him to be, he would cry, he thinks. Tear his hair from his skull and wail his misdoings to the sky, cast himself off from the highest peak he could find to make amends for his failure.

"Sleep," Hela murmurs, and Loki does, uneasily.

* * *

**A/N: **A few notes. In case it weren't clear in the writing, Hela, Jörmungandr, and Fenrir were birthed from Loki. According to some interpretations of the Eddas, Angrboða is actually a name for Loki in female form. I've chosen to run with that interpretation, mainly because I love genderfluid Loki and because I feel it fits MCU!Loki's character better to have his children (save for Sleipnir) to be 'creations' that he made from his own flesh and blood, and birthed from his own womb.

Also, Loki's children call him Mother because, again, I love genderfluid Loki. He always prefers to be called 'he', but he ignores all expectations of him based on his gender, so in a way he's very androgynous. He likes being feminine, IMO.


End file.
